Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Score7.4 out of 10

735 Reviews and Ratings

Experience NXT

What is Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT?

Raiser's Edge NXT is cloud fundraising and constituent relationship management software from Blackbaud.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

the Work Center, which helps each fundraiser manage their portfolio and prioritize tasks that focus on the human side of fundraising, deepening relationships to grow support for your mission. Automated insights reveal areas you should be focusing on, actions completed, constituents who need attention, proposals in progress, gifts received, and progress towards goals. Fundraising leaders leverage Work Center for a holistic view of team performance, forecast pipeline, understand workload, and to zoom in on performance of individual fundraisers.

a constituent record. These are designed to surface everything you would need to know about a supporter in a single place. Tiles containing important supporter information such as contact information, giving history, and wealth ratings can be collapsed and organized according to each user’s preferences.

benchmarking in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, which allows users to better understand fundraising performance with comparisons against other organizations within a specific vertical or mission, or organizations of a similar size. The reports also quantify the revenue potential associated with improving, and surface actionable insight. Metrics include retention rate, recapture rate, acquisition rate, total revenue, revenue per donor, and current donors.

built-in Wealth Screening. Prospect Insights in Raiser’s Edge NXT combines wealth screening and predictive modeling to help identify and qualify major gift fundraising prospects. With Prospect Insights, identify top prospects, assess capacity and likelihood to give, and take proactive steps to cultivate your most valuable prospects.

an example of the out of the box dashboards available. Viewers can schedule and share reports within the product or by email link. Customize dashboards based on what’s important to you and achieve a clear view of your organization’s performance.

Strategy Assistant, which helps fundraising leaders understand performance at a glance by combining benchmarks, peer comparisons, and AIguided strategic context—so they can identify risks and opportunities, get guidance on what the results mean, and decide where to focus next without digging through reports.

Chat for Blackbaud AI, which helps fundraisers get quick answers, draft content, and explore insights using everyday language—so they can move faster without leaving their workflow.

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Role-based user permissions
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration
Category average: 7.6
Online donation options
Online avenues for donation are available, including landing pages, forms, donation buttons, etc.
Category average: 7
Mobile access
Users can access the CRM via an app from a mobile phone or tablet.
Category average: 7

Text and phone donations
Constituents can donate via text or phone call.
Category average: 5
Volunteer shift management
The software allows volunteers to sign up and check in for event shifts.
Category average: 5
Social listening
The software can track constituents’ mentions of the organization on social media platforms.
Category average: 4.5

Sara Niemiec

Advancement Operations Specialist in Marketing at Excelsior University (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT to manage our organization's fundraising efforts with our constituents, mostly our alumni and partners. The product helps us keep track of constituent engagement and giving history. We use RE-NXT email to reach out to our constituents to ask for donations. Services like Deceased Finder and Address Finder help us keep our data current.

Pros

Grid view batch for entering multiple gifts at the same time is fantastic. I can make edits to multiple gifts and pull up their giving history in the same browser tab.
Having tiles which show appeal performance and year-over-year fundraising on the Home screen is great. I appreciate having the visual graphs which immediately show how my team is doing.
Updating payment information on a constituent's automated recurring gift is so easy to do. Having automated recurring gifts in general is also a huge plus. I don't have to think about processing them.

Cons

Raiser's Edge email information, including statistics, is a bit difficult to access after five more recent emails have been sent. The most recent 5 appear in the home screen for Email, and the stats are clean and easy to read. But, when you want to see all sent email information, the columns get crunched, you can't adjust the column size, and need to calculate the open, click, and transaction rates yourself.
I wish we could export the sent email performance results into a spreadsheet. Currently, you can only view it in NXT.
You also cannot preview emails that have already been sent. If you want to see what an email looked like, you have to copy it.

Most Important Features

Gift management
Deceased Finder
Address Finder/NCOA updates. They're processed each quarter and the updates are automatically made to the records.

Return on Investment

We get a clear picture of how our team is doing and can report it out to other units within our organization.
Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT gives us a clear and easily-accessible place to store important documents related to giving on our donor records.
The email marketing tool has saved us time. We can use lists created in the database for the solicitation emails we send out rather than have to upload separate email lists. The email tool also saves graphics in a library, so we don't have to upload them every time we want to send out emails.

Jack Muraca

Director of Advancement at St. Peter's Boys High School (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used for fundraising record-keeping, merchant account transactions, and e-mail communications. There are several issues that I have with the software. Most of the time there are no easy solutions which are frustrating for the annual price that is charged to the customer to maintain it. Adding matching gifts to a constituent, adding a spouse, finding an organization are all very convoluted just to name a few. The fact you can't copy and paste from most areas, just deleting an e-mail does not clear the area you must delete the row. There is no longer use of the merge wizard. There is also no CLEAR way to avoid duplicate records appearing when doing a query involving e-mails. Having e-mails listed under "Specific phones" when doing a query makes absolutely no sense, it is not a phone number. Why can't the merchant account send out a receipt/thank you for recurring donations.

Pros

Taking away merge wizard instead of fixing the problem.
E-mails listed under phones.
Recurring gifts not getting a monthly thank you or receipt.
Adding matching gift companies/foundations to a constituent.

Cons

Automatically adding a spouse after constituent is deceased.
Not being able to edit mailing labels.
The decease finder application is useless.

Most Important Features

Acknowledgement letters.
E-mails
Record keeping.

Return on Investment

Donors feel the transaction is safe and secure on the merchant account.

Patti Hommes, bCRE View profile

Director of Advancement Services at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We primarily use Raiser's Edge in the development/advancement area for gift processing, prospecting, analytics, event management and and community and volunteer information. RE is also accessible in varying degrees throughout the organization. We are integrated with ASchool Information Systems and are premaring to integrate with Financial Edge.

Pros

I’m slowly moving away from my “you can pry database view out of my cold, dead hands” mindset and starting to embrace Unified View. Blackbaud continues to make meaningful improvements, and they genuinely seem to listen to user feedback and ideas to help refine and enhance the system.
I feel that Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT serves as a true “one-stop shop” for our gift and constituent management needs. The information we need is readily accessible, making it easy to create reports and lists both quickly and efficiently.
Within Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, the ability to share reports and lists with leadership via a URL saves time, reduces manual effort, and ensures everyone has immediate access to the most up-to-date information.

Cons

There are a number of shortcut keys from Database View that would significantly enhance efficiency if incorporated into Unified View. I frequently attempt to use them out of habit, which highlights both their value and their absence.
Several batch fields I regularly use in Database View are not yet available in Unified View. As a result, additional steps are required to enter information at the gift or constituent level, which impacts overall workflow efficiency.
There are still tiles in Unified View that cannot be added to or edited without going back to database view.

Most Important Features

Gift Management
Membership Management
Constituelt Management
Prospect Research
Reporting
Anaylitics

Return on Investment

There is a definite increase in productivity and efficiency. Everything is at your fingertips. There is a lot less paperwork, which saves money, and helps the environment!
Integrating with Financial Edge and being able to post gifts to the GL will save us a significant amount of time.
Online gift and event registration batches continue to improve, saving time increasing efficiency.

Other Software Used

SAP Crystal, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Project

Mikki King View profile

Director of Annual Giving at Tiffin University (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Blackbaud for all gift processing, pledges, planned gifts and gift tracking. We also use Blackbaud for our alumni database and higher education fundraising. Blackbaud is our main communication with our donor and alumni.

Pros

Gift Processing
Ability to create and run reports
Ease of tracking visits and donor interaction

Cons

The ability to do all options in NXT that can be completed in the RE database.
More Report options in NXT
More Educational details available to be viewed in NXT

Most Important Features

Entering Visits
Ability to keep track of contact information for alumni and donors
Gift Records

Return on Investment

Our fundraising and alumni are all in one system.
NXT allows for faster documentation of visits, mailings, letters etc.
The new ability to copy notes/actions has saved us so much time!
The auto run features are great (addresses, duplicates, etc)

Other Software Used

Braintree, a PayPal service, MobileCause

Damaris Herron-Watkins View profile

Chief Finance and Operations Officer in Finance and Accounting at A Better Chance (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT is used for managing our fundraising revenue. We us it to record gifts, email communications and to steward our donors. Everything is done in one place and it connects to Financial Edge NXT.