Blackbaud Target Analytics Reviews & Insights

Target Analytics products, The Raiser's Edge, and ResearchPoint/WealthPoint are used by my organization. The Raiser's Edge is the database used by all Institutional Advancement staff. The ResearchPoint/WealthPoint module is used by the Prospect Research/Prospect Management team. The focus of my review will be how our team uses Target Analytics' ResearchPoint. It solves the business problem of data mining and prospect research for new donors to our institution.

ResearchPoint is well suited for Prospect Research, especially if the user has Raiser's Edge as their main database given its integration capabilities with qualified data; however, it is not necessary. I used the Target Analytics product that came before ResearchPoint (The Researcher's Edge) as a stand-alone prospect research database for about a year. For small shops that do not have a prospect researcher or prospect research team, it could even be used by gift officers looking for new prospects or for wealth data on their known prospects.

Once systems are in place, the content is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate. The product is really a one-stop-shop, find prospects, wealth screen them, verify the data (the product saves you time by verifying a lot for you already), sync your findings to The Raiser's Edge, and if you'd like, export or print a professional-looking profile to a .pdf for your president or gift officer.

We use Target Analytics for data enrichment services and for modeling and prospect research in our donor database. The services are extremely helpful for data hygiene and consistent data standardization across the Development department.

Target Analytics is great for organizations that are trying to "mine for gold." There are packages and products that can allow you to clean up your data, append the data, and then finally, score the data to create an increased potential for finding major donors and supportive constituents hiding in your database.