Likelihood to Recommend If you only want to track donations, I'd go with something simpler. If you want to track donations and programs and connections between them, there may be nothing better. If you have no technical abilities and no budget, restricted yourself solely to what it does as described exactly in the manual. If you can't devote about 0.25FTE to the constant maintenance and upgrades, don't go with it.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros NPSP is designed to help with donor management. There are free add-ons for volunteer management. There is a new Program Management Module to better manage program participation and attendance. Campaigns help organize and report on marketing efforts though we use a third-party solution to send out marketing materials. Read full review 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 Read full review Cons Learning curve - very powerful, but takes time to learn Batch processing - takes time and advanced skills to reach efficiency for data entry and certain operations which you want to do in batch Mass email is extremely limited - must choose a third party tool which adds complexity and cost to the system Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew There is really no other tool to compare and especially since Salesforce for Nonprofits is free!!
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability I think Salesforce has so much functionality that it makes it difficult in terms of overall usability. Once you can figure it out, it's a 10/10, it's just getting there. If you're willing to do the work to figure it out then you're golden. For what it's worth, I don't know if you're going to find something with this level of functionality that's easier to figure out
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Support Rating I have never had bad conversations with any support people with Salesforce but we also have not used them very much. I put it a little less because we are struggling to switch to lightning (some of our custom features do not migrate well) and it feels like the help and support for a little organization is not incredibly helpful unless we want to spend a lot of money.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered As a cloud native organization with no previous Microsoft infrastructure, Salesforce was a more logical and effective option for us. The suite of products was also far more comprehensive and required less customization. We were able to adopt a "configure not code" approach to our development of systems to support our mission that lowered the cost of upgrades.
Read full review 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.
Elora Tocci Senior Communications Associate for Public Affairs and Development
Read full review Return on Investment Salesforce has allowed us to easily track donor communications in one area, which I believe has improved our donor communication overall. Salesforce for Nonprofits has made it easier on my org to track and pull donation-related information and has reduced the amount of time we need to do these regular tasks. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud Screenshots