Blackbaud eTapestry

I believer Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited for small to mid-level organizations. It is not as robust as some of the larger donor databases and CRMs, but if you only need the gift history/contact information, Blackbaud eTapestry gets the job done. Data can be exported for use in other programs as well, to fill any gaps.

In my opinionn, if you are considering Blackbaud eTapestry, run!!

In my opinion, not only is the program outdated with overpriced training but their customer service is terrible. We have had Blackbaud eTapestry since 2012. I took over as Executive Director in 2022 and quickly realized we needed a new system. My bookkeeper called and was told we could cancel anytime. We adopted a new system, and then went to cancel Blackbaud eTapestry. In our experience, we were told that they never said that we could cancel and they don't have month to month contracts. We are locked in to a renewal that we didn't consent to for 3 years and nearly $18,000!!! In our experience, there is no way to cancel now and we have not used the product in months.

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.

This product is well suited for our industry and department because it contains the most relevant information that we need to make connections with our donors and alums. It's helpful for an ever-growing and changing team to see what was done in the past and use that information to take into the future when meeting with people.

As we are a small Foundation with only one Administrative Assistant, eTapestry is perfect for me to keep all of our CRM. Once I got used to how it worked, I found it to be user friendly. If I have any problems, I can either try to find the answer for myself in the extensive library, chat to support or email our Customer Service Representative with questions. I cannot fault either the Support team or Customer Service Representatives I have dealt with over the years as all of them have been knowledgeable and extremely helpful. I would prefer to have better options within the Email section as the templates are very basic. There is another option to use an eTapestry partner, but there are additional costs involved in that. The email templates are OK to use if you wish to send quick information to your database.

Overall Blackbaud eTapestry is a really solid CRM option for nonprofits with a mid-sized budget. It's a great younger/less powerful cousin of some of Blackbaud's even more popular products. If you haven't considered it yet, check it out! It's nice because it is specifically made for fundraising and designed with our needs in mind.

Blackbaud eTapestry suites my needs very well, it is easy to use and the Blackbaud team provides great support and regular training sessions. With it belonging to such a powerhouse as Blackbaud, we are able to take advantage of larger scope enhancements that we might not be privy to working with a smaller company, but still use a product that feels like "the right size for us". I'm sure I am biased because I have never worked with a different company in terms of a donor database (I have been the administrator for other style databases though), but they provide a reliable product and they are nice people to work with, so you really can't ask for much more than that.

Blackbaud eTapestry was fine for a starter database and is relatively inexpensive. These days even small nonprofits need more modern and user-friendly platforms, whether it's through Blackbaud or another company. Also the customer service is slow to respond and sometimes just plain unhelpful, it has seemed that Blackbaud has been dialing back resources put into eTapestry and perhaps putting them towards their other database solutions.

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.

Well suited for donations less appropriate for events

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 is a robust database with significant ability to customize. Those are pluses, but also makes it difficult for those whose employees are not database proficient.

Blackbaud eTapestry used to be more affordable, but now with the addition of an annual $600 enablement fee, it puts it out of reach for some nonprofits. eTapestry is their older system, but the new one is well over $7,000 a year, probably even more now, and not affordable to smaller nonprofits. eTapestry has the basics that we need, and we have used it for multiple years, we are just disappointed that the cost has gone up so much without a lot of improvements.

Gives you a lot of information but difficult to understand and hard to access. I have been in the industry for 20 years and this is the most complex CRM I have ever used. Data never appears the same no matter what I do and it is too complicated to run simple queries and reports

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 was definitely trusted to manage all of our data. Super powerful when it came to its ability to run complicated reports. But hard for other staff members (who might not have been "experts") to run any reports. Required extensive experience and knowledge to be able to run simple reports. Wasn't so good with setting up and editing email templates or DIY forms.

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 have grown in size and donor base and Blackbaud eTapestry keeps wanting more money to add more clients, and to utilize the sales tax. Blackbaud eTapestry says they have easy-to-use DIY pages - unlimited oh, but not in our case. You can only have 10 and we have to keep deleting older versions in order to make room for additional ones. We have had to search for answers and do things by trial and error. We have had some great answers provided by the support team but other times, it is a boondoggle. It has the basics for donations, management of funds, and reports to match campaigns. Basic tools. We are ready to move forward to be more efficient, to measure our successes easier, to implement communications easier, and to have reports and analysis at our fingertips.