Blackbaud
I use it to look up data on constituents I work with and keep others in the loop by recording my interactions with constituents. It is …
Overview
What is Blackbaud CRM?
Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
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What is Blackbaud CRM?
Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Kindful, a Bloomerang product?
Kindful aims to help nonprofit organizations across the world fundraise more effectively. Kindful includes fundraising tools, reporting, and analytics all in one CRM. Kindful was acquired by Bloomerang in January, 2021. It is now a Bloomerang product.
What is Causeview?
Causeview aims to make donor management simple. This solution is built on the Salesforce.com platform and according to the vendor, this provides users with best in class fundraising, events, volunteers and payment processing tools on top of the world’s most popular CRM.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Blackbaud CRM?
Blackbaud CRM for enterprise-scale Nonprofits, Higher Education, and Healthcare organizations combines data management and automation with the ability to scale, adapt, and integrate across applications to retain and grow supporter value​. Its out-of-the-box capabilities enable enterprise-level advancement organizations to work more effectively with large, multidimensional datasets, including:
- A holistic view of constituents to manage interactions with them based on whether they are Individuals, Households, Groups, or Corporations and maintain visibility into corporate hierarchy. 
- Sophisticated donor management capabilities such as Stewardship Plans, Fund Management, Recognition Programs, Naming Opportunities, and Donor Challenges to increase donor engagement.
- Market segmentation to support complex multi-channel outreach programs.
- Research and Analytics powered by Blackbaud’s native prospect research tool, ResearchPoint, including data modeling and benchmarking.
- Mobile and web access to empower on the go fundraisers with constituent information through their mobile devices.
- Direct
data access to cloud environments via read-only, read-write, and self-service
developer portal to speed development cycle while maintaining control and
optimizing security and compliance.
Blackbaud CRM Features
- Supported: A single source of truth with a holistic view of constituents whether they are Individuals, Households, Groups, or Corporations
- Supported: Moves management and stewardship capabilities to expand and nurture major donors
- Supported: Segmentation support for multi-channel campaigns
- Supported: Planned Giving, Matching Gift Management, and Online Giving to support specialized fundraising needs
- Supported: Automated receipting and acknowledgement, end-to-end credit card processing and robust accounting functionality streamline gift and revenue management
- Supported: Ability to tap into Blackbaud's philanthropic data set and data modeling
- Supported: Integration with business intelligence and data analytics solutions.
- Supported: Microsoft integrations to automate key visualizations, workflows and build low-code/no-code apps
- Supported: Open, industry-standard REST APIs to extend and customize the core CRM solution.
- Supported: Wide selection of partner apps in Blackbaud Marketplace.
- Supported: Extensible revenue data model to manage process of tracking, crediting and recognizing donors based on the gifts they make
- Supported: Embedded data hygiene management including duplication management and address validation
Blackbaud CRM Competitors
Blackbaud CRM Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | Global - US, Canada, EMEA, Asia-Pacific |
Frequently Asked Questions
Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
Salesforce Sales Cloud, Bloomerang, and Ellucian CRM Advance are common alternatives for Blackbaud CRM.
Reviewers rate Implementation Rating highest, with a score of 8.2.
The most common users of Blackbaud CRM are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
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January 16, 2024
Blackbaud
I use it to look up data on constituents I work with and keep others in the loop by recording my interactions with constituents. It is helpful to have one place to look for all information about a constituent.
- Allows me to link my email interactions directly into the system
- Has areas to store all information about a person
- Easy to pull just the information I need
January 05, 2024
Review from fundraising professional
We use Blackbaud CRM to house the data on all of our donors and constituents. It tracks information on them such as giving history, contact information, education info, events attended, and employment information. I use many data points when pulling in constituents to mass communication efforts. I also use data points to do prospect research and refer major gift prospects to major gift officers.
- Easy to edit data points (address, etc.)
- When viewing a constituent you can see a lot of data points at once
- Giving history is fairly easy to navigate and understand
- When querying data, it will double count gifts (self credit and spouse credit)
- Unable to delete prior contact info, can only end date it
- Unable to list preferred pronouns
January 04, 2024
The Higher Education Standard
We use blackbaud CRM for fundraising purposes across a major public university campus. Blackbaud CRM covers all aspects of our donor and alumni engagement, from major gift fundraising, events, volunteer boards, annual fundraising, marketing segmentation and athletic points.
- Display of Information
- Customization
- Covering all aspects of fundraising
- Though Customizable, can be difficult to do
- Expansion of Salesforce like interaction management
January 04, 2024
BB e-CRM - Investigated, selected, installed and rewarded!
We use BBCRM to track all gifts by Alumni, Donors and friends to the University. This includes actual cash gifts, pledges, matching gifts, planned gifts etc. We populate the system with in depth bio, personal and financial data and then use the system to sort and highlight potential prospects. The system is available to all staff at the University although access to certain data is restricted by use case. Currently we have about 500 active users across campus. The system is available 24/7 and is reachable via any internet connection through a series of secure firewalls and MFA. It is also available on IOS devices.
- Accessing in-depth data for a single constituent is easily done and customizable by user working with "tiles" on the home screen
- Generating lists of possible prospects with specific similarities can be done with a few clicks and then stored for more research later
- well designed relationship options allow for a a look at specific constituents and how they might relate to other constituents in the system leading to more effective prospecting
- Screens can be easily customized by user or user group eliminating irrelevant data and presenting only truly relevant information
- Tighter integration with other BB products like Award Management would be nice
- Better emailing and event modules within BBIS would allow us to do more within CRM and not have to support extra software
- More and better API will allow users to build more sophisticated interface to external products
January 02, 2024
Good product!
We use it to keep with information on our donors; how much they have given, where they live, their communication preferences, interactions with our fundraisers, and other data points that help us determine who to ask for a gift and how much to ask. We have almost 9M records of donors with all of this information and the database is crucial to my every day work.
- Volume of information it can hold
- Flexibility around customizing how we store data
- Making customizations easier
- There are some free text fields that are so small it makes reading things like a contact report very difficult.
December 27, 2023
Adequate but not Exceptional
Our organization uses Blackbaud to capture constituent (alumni, faculty/staff, current students, friends) information, including biographical, education, involvements, interactions, and revenue; and query this information based on fundraiser needs.
- Blackbaud constituent profiles are easy to navigate to find basic information (address, phone, email, prospect manager, documentation).
- The constituent summary at the top of the constituent page is useful for quickly seeing pertinent information.
- Links embedded within the constituent summary make it easy to quickly navigate a constituent's profile.
- Certain aspects of Blackbaud are oddly non-customizable.
- Blackbaud updates/support is slow and often ineffective - our organization switched to Microsoft 365, which is apparently incompatible with Blackbaud. Help/support recommended clunky workarounds that don't actually work, rather than proactively enhancing compatibility
- There should be a flag in constituent search to show which people in the results list are deceased.
- Query isn't very user friendly. It should be simple to locate the information that you want to pull, and add parameters to that information. Instead you have to write multiple queries to set parameters, then write a query that looks at those other queries. It's time-consuming and easy to make mistakes, and the knowledge/proficiency is difficult to explain or transfer to new staff.
- Blackbaud generally just feels like its technology is outdated. It wasn't built for the needs of a modern organization, and its developers have failed to make the necessary improvements over time to stay competitive.
We utilize it for donor records, prospect management, bbis, wealth screening, donor information
- Analytics
- Wealth screening
- Sophisticated functionality
- Customer service
- New development
June 01, 2023
Blackbaud CRM provides value for better fundraising, relationship management, and prospect engagement
We use CRM to manage all alumni, parent, and student data. It is largely focused on fundraising activity, relationship building through engagement, and moves management for prospects. It addresses many things at once - it is a one-stop place to find information. I use it daily and regularly as a fundraiser. It keeps track of my prospects, managing those relationships, and fundraising activity. Thankfully, our in-house team of Information Services routinely makes improvements and listens to feedback from fundraisers who use it nearly everyday.
- Makes it easy for fundraisers to keep track of the activity they need or want to accomplish
- Allows fundraisers to easily enter email correspondence through their email add-on
- Listens to customer feedback and makes quality enhancements
- The sticky function of data filtering.
- It can be overwhelming because there is so much information.
- The way revenue/gifts are can be confusing. There are also too many tabs to find information.
- There are a lot of little frustrations and tedious little steps to complete.
Blackbaud was an innovative product that was used within the advancement/development office at the post-secondary institution where I had worked at. Blackbaud was primarily used at this post-secondary institution to manage donations and fundraising. Donations and fundraising contributions were obtained and entered into the system, reconciled and charitable tax receipts were issued using Blackbaud. It addressed many issues by providing a means to efficiently track donations.
- Efficiently tracks charitable donations
- Strong analytics and reports
- Creates tax receipts for donors
- Can be difficult to use if you don't have experience - more user friendly
- The reports and analytics are not easily customisable.
- User/Customer support can be improved.
February 06, 2020
Blackbaud CRM has solved all of our needs!
At Florida State University, we currently use Blackbaud CRM across the entire organization. About 7 years ago, we switched from another platform that was very outdated and hard to use. Blackbaud CRM allowed us to add more details about the many constituents we serve, including current students, alumni, and friends of the university. We can track interactions, event attendance, giving history, and even keep notes within each constituent profile. It has helped us immensely as we all work with the same populations in different capacities.
- It is incredibly user-friendly! From the first time I opened a constituent profile, I could easily navigate between tabs and find the information I need in a timely fashion without confusion.
- It allows personalization! Depending on what information is most relevant to me, I can organize the widgets that are shown first. I typically look at the same few pieces of information on every profile, so I don't have to dig for it!
- I love the "Recently Accessed" feature to the left of the main page. It helps me navigate to the last few records I've looked at. However, if I'm doing a fuzzy search for "John Smith" and I click on the wrong one, it'd be great if that search was added to my "recently accessed" list, instead of just the record I clicked on. This would allow me to keep up with which names in the search I've already looked at.
- Query View! I have recently started using queries and they are so helpful. However, they are very difficult to learn and hard to tailor to exactly what I need. The main issue, as a higher education institution, is that a lot of our constituents have multiple pieces of information for categories. For example, if I want to pull a list of alumni who graduated with a degree in Marketing, some alumni may be missing if their primary degree is not Marketing - and some alumni may be repeated.
Blackbaud CRM would be a great tool for larger organizations or higher education institutions with a high quantity of constituents. It is great for organizing a lot of information in a single record. While it would be great for any organization, it may be under-utilized for smaller businesses that don't have repeat customers or constant information streams.
January 06, 2020
Blackbaud for your non-profit
My organization made the switch from an older, more basic database, to Blackbaud during the Summer of 2017. I was in charge of the process and the reason we made the jump was that the other database was too simple, didn't have enough functionality, or even multi-user access. Since making the transfer, the organization added more and more functionalities.
- Accurate collection of contact information.
- Multi-user access.
- Payment options.
- Forms.
December 04, 2019
Blackbaud leaves much to be desired
We used it to collect donations and donor information for our non-profit. It allowed us to store, categorize, and sort data across the organization in one platform.
- Growing donor/supporter base.
- Collecting donations.
- Having a landing page for donations.
- The internal CMS is extremely difficult to use.
- It's hard to get someone on the phone.
We use it for email newsletters to donors, donation forms on our website and for data management. It's being used by our Communications and Development departments. It addresses the business problem of emailing our audience and allowing donors to safely make online donations.
- Customizable
- Personalization in emails
- Support articles
- Hard to use interface
- Outdated front end
- Importing contacts takes multiple steps, is not easy or intuitive
- Hard to teach others how to use Blackbaud
- Difficult to find what I need
- Very hard to segment out inactive emails
June 01, 2016
Not just another database solution...
The organization I was at used Blackbaud CRM for record management, processing of gifts, events, reports, etc.
- Support is second-to-none.
- Blackbaud CRM is one of the more customizable options. Since you can't always be sure of future needs, this is a must-have.
- It is one of the easier systems to learn. Many CRM options are cumbersome and require much more training. I had no issue training individuals with varied experience levels.
- As with most (read: all) Blackbaud products, the pricing is a bit high. There are other options that are significantly cheaper - which makes Blackbaud CRM a much less-likely option for smaller organizations.
February 12, 2016
Blackbaud review
We are the philanthropic arm for a local community owned hospital. Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge was used as our donor database for record management, gift processing, reporting and events.
- Pledge reports are clear and easy to run, as well as a few other financial reports.
- Records are clearly organized with tabs to select your area of interest
- Record searching is all inclusive
- The platform for event management and registration did not work as promised. Data being imported was all wrong and had to be removed
- Poor customer service
- Social fundraising aspect did not work as promised
January 15, 2016
CRM after using and implementing for multiple organizations
Blackbaud CRM is being used by participating Federations (separate organizations) as their sub ledger for fund raising and overall constituent management. It provides the ability to have a comprehensive view of constituents and is customizable to meet additional needs.
- The user interface is user friendly, intuitive and customizable through security. Reduces the change management obstacle in training.
- The application is both configurable and customizable. This presents significant benefits in addressing unanticipated needs, once the proper resources, and training are established. Examples are creating custom reports, adding functionality, interfacing with other applications / platforms.
- Support and application enhancements. Blackbaud support is effective in addressing out of the box functionality and overall supporting customizations as well. Blackbaud's knowledge base and community provide several resources that can be leveraged in support and enhancing the application.
- As an enterprise application, I would like to see additional application administration functionality incorporated as part of the application. A specific example is providing additional functionality to address database maintenance.
- Additional report development tools to allow users (non technical) to create dynamic reports. Currently you can use MS Report Builder and leverage an adhoc query but believe this can be enhanced further.
- Surface the Financial Transaction Model to the application further. This would allow users to see revenue changes overtime better when reconciling revenue.
January 08, 2016
I'm a fan of Blackbaud!
We used it while I was at UGA. They still use it [as] a broad based donor and constituent management database. It is used to track donor contact reports and giving information and a broad spectrum of alumni and donor information. It is used to run reports and in overall relationship management with key people.
- The product was very good at maintaining records and information. The information was agile and simple to retrieve and operationalize.
- The system is user friendly. We implemented across an entire campus and more specifically within a division with hundreds of employees. Overall people took to it quickly.
- The product I think does a more than adequate job of managing contact tracking which is key in all kinds of fields. This is critical because either for your own reasons, or as you depart from an organization, you are able to leave an accurate track record of your activities for the organization's continued success.
- Three words. Desk. Top. Queries. I advocated for this the whole time I was there. Was told that users querying information from their desktops would crash the system. Can't believe it. Product like this shouldn't have that problem and as a user, my job would have been made infinitely easier had I been able to query information on the desktop.
April 08, 2015
Blackbaud/Convio daily user
Almost our entire organization uses Blackbaud CRM to manage our participant database for our clients' fundraising events, including event registration (teamraiser), donations, email campaigns and websites (PageBuilder). It is a one-stop shop for event fundraising and communications.
- It integrates your database, allowing you to collect registrations and donations online, and then build email communications and websites that integrate with those contacts, so you don't have to import/export between tools.
- It also provides tools for your participants, so they can customize their experience with your website and your communications, manage their own fundraising and participation, and conduct their own peer-to-peer fundraising efforts.
- Blackbaud's responsiveness to their clients reporting issues with their CRM is notoriously delayed. It often takes them years to address bugs, and if the issues reported are just "nice to haves" and non-urgent, they often never get addressed.
- The system has required significant customization on our end to make it work for us. While we've had clients who are smaller organizations use it right out of the box, if you are a larger organization with more specific needs, you're going to need a consultant or a IT department to help you customize the system.
- The help feature built into the system is not very helpful and often outdated, with information that doesn't reflect the way the system currently operates. (They are also doing updates but not updating the help.) The online trainings that Blackbaud offers are pretty superficial and often don't speak to the way an organization uses the system. I've trained myself to use the system, through trial, error and explore, and our organizations trains all of our employees and clients on Blackbaud ourselves. Blackbaud does not provide that.
July 08, 2014
Easy to Use!
CRM was used by my organization to hold constituent data and to track interactions, activities and financial contributions.
- Track constituent information
- Record financial information
- Store constituent information such as interactions, donations and activities.
- Synching with the CMS
July 02, 2014
BBNC ...is it for your org?
I used it in the development department in a variety of ways:
- Donor information-donation tracking, contactable information
- Website platform
- Membership selling and tracking
- Managing campaigns
- Event registration
- BBMS (merchant account)
- Locked configuration strategy- if you have a high turn over, or an undocumented culture you will want to find a solution that supports change management. The config files are locked in Blackbaud which means some things you can't change. For orgs that have frequent turn-over this strategy is helpful.
- Blackbaud has tutorials online as well as classes in person staff can take. They offer certificates so supervisors know that staff have been exposed to a body of knowledge. When staff members take the workshops it is important to provide them the time to practice and use what they just learned. We purchased (for a high fee) a pass for any of our staff to take as many of the workshops as possible. We also offered this to key volunteers- as more knowledge makes folks more employable and more comfortable.
- Blackbaud has a very strong team of sales staff. Make sure you demo and that you know what you want. Fees are sadly complicated so use a spreadsheet. Once a quote is sent in writing my experience is there was very little flexibility in pricing. So your first call is really important. Do your homework.
- The Sales experience is rough. Be prepared. Write everything down. It is rough because if you are new you do not know what to ask for. You have the purchase of the function and the maintenance of the functionality you purchase. It is complicated and tricky. It is also frustrating.
- Costs are not consistent. Caution...you are on your own to set your limit or what you can pay, If you are not a techy and new or uncomfortable with negotiations you probably should involve others. Make them explain each line item to you. Do not sign until you know you have everything you will need to achieve your goals.
- There documentation is old school and lacks graphics, workflow and is loaded with text. I would like to use user videos with click through demos.
June 30, 2014
A Fundraiser's View of the CRM suite
Our organization used it as the database for donors. We used it across the organization, but primarily by fundraising and marketing staff. It addresses the problem of storing and retrieving information about donors and prospects, and then using that information for historical perspective, as well as sorting for mail lists, invitations to events, etc.
- Plenty of space to add detailed notes
- Easy for different members of the staff to see the same information
- Can be used well by trained staff to pull reports for management
- Not always easy to use when trying to find a new function that one was not previously familiar with
- No ability to use via iPhone or other mobile device
- Not easy for remote users who are not inside the secure company network to print reports - too many steps to go through the VPN, etc.
June 25, 2014
My Review and what it do...
I was using a specially developed version for helping the Salvation Army deploy emails and landing pages for various corps.
- Constituent Management - It's a great database to store donor information
- Email Deployment - Since joining with Convio there are a lot more functionalities
- Landing Page Provisioning - It's a great place to keep all assets in one place
- The main area for improvement is with access for agencies. Seeing that Salvation Army utilized many agencies it was hard to make sure that assets stayed unique to one place.
June 25, 2014
More than just a donor database
We use eTapestry as our donor database and as our moves management system for the entire organization. This includes the development department and well as marketing, mission services and our commercial services department, which has more sales functions. The main problem that it helps to address is lack of organized communication. With one search of the database, anyone can tell all of the activity that has been done with a constituent throughout the entire organization.
- Customization of fields is really awesome - you can do basically anything you can think of
- Report pulling is super useful and you can analyze any information that is in the database
- Mobile/remote access is particularly useful in our organization
- Reports can be tricky to get correct
- Mass imports are hard to get correct - you often have to refer back to the fields, which means you have to start over completely
- Sometimes, the system just runs super slow