Blackbaud eTapestry

I don't feel that the system is the most user-friendly or easiest to navigate. I do wish that it was a bit easier to be able to understand a certain function or have a shortcut to the help area - instead of having to click the help button, click another button to actually go to a help page, then have to search for what you are trying to learn. On the plus side, I believe it is pretty simple to add a new account or a new entry to an existing account. And I like that you have the ability to create multiple campaigns and link that campaign to a journal entry when we have someone make a monetary donation to our organization. That allows me to pull a list to see who donated to a specific event we had. As a basic system to add in accounts and keep track of simple things like volunteer hours and donations, I think that Blackbaud eTapestry works. If you are an organization that needs to have detailed information, enter multiple notes under accounts, or track more than five events per year, I don't believe that this system would be the best fit.

Blackbaud eTapestry is a fantastic program for small organizations. The functionality is easy to use. All fields can be customized and affiliations can be created for ease of queries and reporting. It is well suited for organizations that have 10,000 records or less. If you are looking at tracking education related information, such as student information and not fundRaising related, this is not the program for you. It is strictly a fund development and fundRaising database that houses pertinent donor information versus activity tracking. Fields are customizable, and that is fantastic, depending on what you intend on doing with the information. If you are considering Blackbaud eTapestry to do social interactions, find emails and coduct wealth screenings, do not trust all the information you receive back. We found that the email and social finders were not accurate, and neither were the wealth screenings. For some constiuents it worked, but the vast majority, we were better off contacting the donor and gathering information that way.

If you are an organization with less than 10,000 constituents, eTapestry is the program for you. It is easily managed for small nonprofits and the support for technical issues is good. Blackbaud has a whole online knowledgebase and educational videos to help you learn what would be best for your organization.

Pros: 1) Easy to make donor acknowledgement letters for old and new accounts. 2) Easy to see previous donations on an account. 3) Easy to add new donations to an account. Cons: 1) Not always intuitive (ex: difficult to pull list of donors from a specific 12-month period); learning curve to fully implement 2) Sometimes eTapestry is slow/takes a while to buffer - not always immediate results.

It is a good beginner solution - with the basic functions easy to find and use. For larger more complex organizations a more robust system may be needed.

Blackbaud e-Tapestry works extremely well for managing the basics of donations. The standard queries/reports and custom queries/reports work well for the basic questions and analysis. However, for more complex data queries, creating a query and running a report can be difficult and/or impossible. It also doesn't always integrate seamlessly with 3rd party event/non-profit software, which leads to the need to enter data manually. Overall, it is a great starting point for donation management. However, it could be more innovative in queries/reports and in sending acknowledgment letters. For example, it would be great to send a thank you video to connect with donors within the software, in addition to a regular letter, but that isn't an option.

Blackbaud eTapestry is fine. Useful for a new fundraiser. It leaves a lot to be desired but you can operate nicely with under 10,000 constituents

Blackbaud eTapestry has been nearly impossible to work with when wanting to look at cost reduction. We are currently in the process of leaving and have the process of data migration to be very painstaking to do with eTap customer services. Additionally we were locked out of our account for the five days within our contract but towards the ends making data migration actually impossible. Really put our organization in a horrible position.

Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited for an organization of our size (mid sized) to effectively manage our donor database. Because we generate most of our mailings in-house, eTapestry makes to generation of these segmented lists easy. While there are capabilities that take time to learn, this software is fairly easy to obtain a simple mastery of. If your organization is large, with a large donor base you will not want eTapestry as there are record limitations, which can be overcome by purchasing additional records, which is a yearly (not one-time) fee.

For this organization, which is still growing, eTapestry is perfect for our current needs. As stated in the previous statement, eTapestry needs those improvements to make everyday usage easier.

Great software for a medium sized organizations with simple reporting requirements. Its customizability options gives it room to accommodate many features that an organization might need as it grows.

We find the system works well for a small to medium shop. Easy to handle, quick and customizes well. Generates basic reports well. Auto processing and scheduling is also smooth and easy. Emails can look like spam in some systems. Tracking prospects via moves management and integration with Outlook, especially calendars, could be improved.

When we want to send a mass email to our donors and/or other contacts, Blackbaud eTapestry provides the tools to make it happen. That being said, when someone wants to unsubscribe from one of our email lists, but not all of them, eTapestry does not have a way to do that. If someone hits the Unsubscribe button, it unsubscribes them from everything. So it depends on what your needs are regarding that setting. The DIY Form settings were recently upgraded to allow us to send a different confirmation email based on whether a donor gave a one-time donation or a recurring donation. This is such a valuable option, as we previously had donors contact us to double-check that they had set up a monthly donation online, as the previous confirmation email didn't say (since that setting wasn't available). I'm not sure if the communication templates can distinguish between a monthly, weekly, or quarterly recurring donation, so we removed the weekly and quarterly options from our donation page and directly added "monthly" to the communication template.

Tracking donor information and reports work well. I am new to this software and normally the only person who uses it. Others who use it on occasion are frustrated because they don't understand how to do what they want. I wonder if some of the challenges with documents I have may be that I still need more understanding. Maybe they will solve themselves as I learn. Or maybe they are just not as easy as other products. We some times create documents for email outside of eTapestry because it is easier to get what we want, then import to eTapestry as an image for a mass email.

Reporting of my campaigns TY to LY. The process to get this reporting is very easy.

Being able to send emails to our entire database or to a small specialized group of our donors.

Being able to insert personalized field's into the communications really elevates the letters we write to the donors.

Blackbaud worked well to run a report on student information for grant reporting.

Blackbaud eTapestry works well for logging in donations. It is quite difficult to get a report with cumulative totals.

I think it is a great program and has tons of potential for my organization. It has taken me a while to learn it, as I use it at a part-time position and have had no training. Self-teaching is not always the quickest, but I do eventually learn. If you want to keep track of donors, campaigns, and donations, this makes it a much easier process than no process at all or trying to coordinate spreadsheets from different programs.

I like its ability to show how many accounts don't have email addresses or have opted out of our mailing. When printing and mailing out thank you cards, it offers the option to make a note of the contact, but since I sometimes go back and forth before officially mailing it out, it's not always accurate but could be if there was an "initiated" option and then a follow-up option that confirms the offline action was completed.

Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited to an organization or company that has many types of users or constituents. Having a dedicated person or small team to manage the database is key. As we are finding, it is only as useful as the data put into it. Stale and irregular updates do not give an accurate picture of the organization's database. In my opinion, a small organization may be overwhelmed by Blackbaud eTapestry unless a scalable version can be crafted to suit their needs.

Affordable for smaller nonprofits that cannot afford Raisers Edge from Blackbaud. The pricing tiers can be more suited to these smaller organizations. For example, charges are determined by how many constituents are in the database. The lowest tier is 5000 constituents. If you go over that, the next tier is at 10,000 constituents. There should be a pricing tier in between, such as 7500 constituents. That's a big jump to make for smaller organizations.

Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited for organizations that will have numerous users. We have multiple schools that work together to provide the best educational experience, and Blackbaud eTapestry keeps us organized and consistent. The greatest challenge is getting the reports you need. It can be a challenging system when it comes to reports and lists.

We have had 12 account executives at Blackbaud in the last four years and, in my experience, often must wait 2-3 weeks to receive a response from any communication sent with multiple follow-ups. Each new member must become familiar with our non-profit and the details needed before they can actually be helpful, making us rehash our entire 4-year history- I feel it's a waste of time on our part. In my experience, any work they do is $200 per hour, with absolutely no hours included in our service contract. In my experience, a random $800 fee was implemented last year for all clients outside of their contract. Our account executive at the time said there had been major pushback, but nothing could be done. Basically, in my opinion, they knew it would be more expensive for a client to hire an attorney to fight it than to just pay. I feel they have questionable ethics, and unless you are a large client for them, they really could care less about you.

I wouldn't dissuade someone from using Blackbaud eTapestry, but I would encourage them to fully look into other options before choosing a DMS.