Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit vs. Raiser's Edge

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit is well suited for non-profit settings requiring one coordinated and one-stop-shop for electronic file management, especially of Microsoft file types such as Microsoft Word documents, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint presentations. Some scenarios where it is less appropriate are for those who need to transfer or share files across different platforms outside of the Microsoft Suite of products.

Incentivized

Raisers Edge is outstanding for storing and reporting on constituent data and communications. There are many options for creating methods of tracking by different information included and also for creating personalized tracking methods.

Raisers Edge is not very well suited for an organization that also has a gift shop and visitors center. Allowing membership admission and item sales is not practical.

Incentivized

• Providing a basic framework for nonprofit organizations who've been limping along or have capped out with their current platforms to consider switching to amplify and multiply their capabilities, reach, and impact
• Increasing the accessibility for both citizen developers and tech teams to extend a platform, so long as there are clear parameters (business use case) and thoughtful design and architecture planning
• Sharing some core infrastructure that accelerates the use of important tools to further the mission of nonprofit organizations

• Raiser's Edge is good in allowing detailed categorizations for donations - Funds/Campaigns/Appeals/Packages
• Raiser's Edge has good query functioning and is helpful in pulling lists and segments of constituents and donations
• The variety of detail across sections (Gifts/Bios/Actions) is helpful for recording and archiving constituent information

Incentivized

• The system is ridiculously hard to implement, requiring too many tiers of Microsoft cloud services to be enabled.
• The technical aspects of the product are far too complex for anyone with standard cloud-based app training to implement.
• The non-profit "qualification" system is poorly designed.

Incentivized

• Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
• Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.

Incentivized

Powerful and scalable system that can continuously be developed as requirements evolve

There are many CRM tools on the market however Raisers Edge especially with NXT offers everything you need in one database. It’s a little pricey however Blackbaud support is super helpful and they offer so many tools and add ins.

Incentivized

it does lots of things well (prospect tracking and event management), some things FANTASTIC (gift records and donations and relationships). It is rigid enough for the database administrator to maintain good clean data, but flexible enought for customization across organizations so specific data can be kept as needed for YOUR specific organization needs.

Incentivized

Since the software is expensive to use, only so many people are able to active users at once. There are times when I may have to wait or ask another user to log out so that I may log in.

Incentivized

For most users, only chat support is available. There is a phone number, but it is very labor-intensive to get someone on the phone, and the chat does not include an easy way to screen share. Those sessions need to be scheduled in advance and almost begged for; the chat line always has a long wait time, and sometimes it seems their support personnel is chatting with more than one client at a time.

Incentivized

It's critically important to consider where you are taking your fundraising efforts and strategy, and to collaborate closely with other departments who will also use RE. I would strongly recommend that you investigate best practices -both from Blackbaud (theory) and with other organizations (practice) - to create a user manual and guide for RE within your organization

Incentivized

Other solutions may have a head start in terms of features, but MC4N is catching up quickly. Easy integration with the entire Microsoft tech stack including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, Power BI saves costs over time. Microsoft’s Power Platform also allows for easy and rapid low code extensibility. Finally, the Common Data Model enables interoperability with other products and oAppSource apps.

Salesforce has a more modern feel and I felt that it was easier to perform functions beyond the basics, such as running reports for analysis, on Salesforce. But The Raisers Edge already existed at my company and given that I only needed it for basic functions and did not need much training to do those, I decided to use The Raisers Edge.

Incentivized

• Attempting to deploy Microsoft Cloud for Non-profits had a negative impact on our donor relations staff, the technical team tasked to deploy it, and upper management who watched the deployment fail.
• Overall, this product is too dependent on too many Microsoft Cloud services to really deploy with any sort of clear expectation to management of what the "hidden" costs would be.

Incentivized

• It takes longer than necessary to do things so that makes it cost more staff time to complete the work we need. One example is with online gifts since you can't import these into a batch we have to manually add all of the online gifts which is time consuming.

Incentivized