Likelihood to Recommend If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions.
Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on
Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.
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 Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details. SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually. SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business. 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 Price point for smaller startups. Not budget friendly. 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 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 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 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 Salesforce Starter is exactly what it says. It's specific to getting a small business up and running effectively, without unnecessary development or internal overhead required. It doesn't allow for a ton of customization, but it provides more than most other providers across sales, service, and integration/automating business processes. Some tools are more specific to organizations that want to focus on a specific area to grow or manage their business. That's where the other package types and integrations with specific tools come in
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 We have noticed since we have started using SalesforceIQ to communicate items on customer account notes we have freed up hours of phone time between employees allowing us to better answer customer phone calls. This is especially true in our parts department where we have inside and outside sales. We tied in use of Salesforce to our bonus structure to encourage employees to use the software. It is the direction our business is going and we needed everyone to participate to make it work. The newer the employee the better they are about logging information and visits. 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 Starter Screenshots