Blackbaud FIMS

Formerly MicroEdge

Blackbaud FIMS is well suited for ease of data entry for new requests and immediate access to Guidestar/Candid. We have grants dating back to the 1940s. Blackbaud discontinued historical grants entry. They also discontinued immediate declinations which we used monthly to process over 300 declinations per year.

It is a very robust system and with the various modules you can accomplish much of what is needed for traditional transaction US-based grantmaking. If you have more complicated grantmaking, deal with foreign currencies or want to have tighter alignment of finance and budget numbers, GIFTS may not meet your needs. Additionally, some of their core projects have limited accessibility in terms of various mobile devices or access from outside the organization's network.

I believe a company starting out with a whole new database may take advantage of MicroEdge GIFTS. However, GIFTS would not work well for an organization which is transferring their old data onto the platform. GIFTS does not update well as time passes and data would most likely be lost and/or corrupted. I have not worked with the newest GIFTS online, so I do not know if that process would be smooth or not, but from what my coworkers told me upon hire, it seems GIFTS was very difficult to customize online. When attempting to use GIFTS online, our organization was told that we'd have to pay an invoice of several thousand dollars to change three words in a paragraph on the online system. Lastly, and most importantly, we found MicroEdge's customer service to be nearly impossible to reach, rude, and never helpful when help was sought out. Organizations which would need help with the program should not expect to be serviced in a timely or helpful manner.

I think MicroEdge can meet a wide variety of organizational needs, whether you have $20 million in assets or $500 million. Our foundation manages $200 million in assets and GIFTS Classic has helped us do this efficiently. We realize that as we grow we will need a more sophisticated system, thus our move to GIFTS Online. The only scenario I would recommend an organization considering MicroEdge to look into first, is whether their CRM or financial management database can sync with GIFTS. Currently our accounting software does not sync with GIFTS, which was once a goal of ours, and we are forced to continue processing our grants manually as opposed to electronically.