eTapestry Reviews

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.

eTapestry is well suited for tracking information about the donors and their giving history.

It is not well suited for event tracking even with the workarounds they recommend.

For the size of the organization that we are, eTapestry is a great option when looking for a database that allows you to control and manage a limited amount of individuals.

When it comes to larger organization or complex ones at that, really look into the different options out there. There are many databases that will do some of the things that eTap does without being super complicated.

We're actually in the process of migrating to a new donor management database that we found to be much simpler to use and report from. I'd still recommend eTapestry to organizations where the users will be able to get up to speed quickly and not feel overwhelmed, but I'd recommend something else for an org that would be relying on less tech savvy users or volunteers for data entry and reporting.

eTapestry is a wonderful starter database for smaller non-profits. The price is wonderful, the training is superb, and though it has a few limitations, it is a great place to start.

For a small nonprofit, without many fundraising campaigns/constituent segments, I would recommend this product. If you need complicated reports and deep data dives, this is not an appropriate CRM.

eTapestry is a great tool for departments that handle donations of any kind. It is well suited for organizations large and small. It would also be a good tool for organizations that deal with a lot of customers. It has the ability to save all kinds of information including details that might help a customer feel important to an organization.

eTapestry is well suited when maintaining contact and gift information for donors, volunteers, prospective donors, etc.

When volunteers are involved, eTapestry is well suited. Volunteers can be self-sufficient with it after just a short time.

eTapestry is well suited for all fundraising!

eTapestry is best suited for a development function. It could be used as a sales database but isn't ideal.

It's fine for tracking pledges and payments, but not great for capturing relationships, running reports, or setting up task lists.

I think that if you invest the time to learn the system, it is able to do everything that you need it to do. It's also pretty inexpensive as donor databases go. I will say that it's probably best suited to a work environment where someone is going to specialize in its use. It's not user friendly enough for a one-person shop where a development person has many other competing priorities. It can be frustrating unless you put that time in.

If you're just doing individual donors, eTapestry is fine, but you should compare the UI and price to other smaller options. If you want to also track programs, volunteers or grants, you should check out Salesforce.com, which I consider to be a much better fit for most organizations.

It used to be a good option for those who couldn't afford Raiser's Edge. I no longer think that is true.

There are so many new products being developed that it just isn't competitive any more. We will be moving to NationBuilder. I would recommend doing research on sites like this one and at NTEN, as well as Wikipedia-there are some good software comparison charts there to get started on evaluating what will work for our needs.

I would say eTapestry is great for small to midsize non-profit organizations. Because payments and gifts need to be entered by hand, it would be cumbersome for a large organization to use this program. The main issue here is the number of "clicks" it takes to even get to the "add gift" screen. There is no "one click" option.

The key question is your budget, how much you raise per year, and the skill level of those who will be using it. It's a an option worth considering for nonprofits who can't spend more than ~$2,000/yr on a system, who raise less than $500,000/yr., and who don't have seasoned donor database staff.

I've never used another product, so I can't speak to that. It's such a powerful tool that I think any organization with a small to large donor base could use it. The only ones that might not find it powerful enough are national nonprofits with huge numbers of donors to sort through and organized in more sophisticated ways. But we have several thousand donors with many records for each one, and have no trouble keeping track of all of the details.

It was very well suited to enter and track donations.

I'm not sure.

eTapestry is well suited to very large orgs which have money to spend and don't mind wasting some money on people who don't open emails, etc. It is less appropriate for smaller scale organizations, I think, since they usually have less money and won't necessarily be using the fundraising functionality very much.

eTapestry is well suited for an organization who has a full-time development team who can manage the CRM on a day-to-day basis. It is not suited for use by a top-level executive who does not have the time to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

It is manageable and affordable for smaller organizations but I don't necessarily think that eTapestry is the best fit for larger organizations with thousands of donors as I imagine it would have limited functionality for their needs.

It is well suited for the small nonprofit looking to track a small set of data. For a larger organization, that has multi-channel fundraising - it is not appropriate. It is not good for those that partake in direct mail, telemarketing, plus email marketing. I would be sure that the organization knows it's 5 year strategic plan prior to purchasing a database.

There is a certain size of organization that is well suited to this product. For straightforward donor and gift management, eTapestry is leagues better than an access database at an accessible cost. As an organization grows and requires management and reporting for things like capital campaigns, large scale events, peer-to-peer fundraising, recurring memberships, it would be imperative to lean heavily on the "User Defined Fields" capabilities. That opens an organization up to more user error and some pretty complicated reporting.

Anyone shopping for a donor database needs to understand that there is no perfect solution. You are looking for the best intersection of price, ease-of-use and functionality. During the selection process, I would survey the types of operation you need a database to manage and determine if eTapestry has modules that fit your needs. If there is no module, you will have to build that functionality in User Defined Fields (UDF). I would dedicate an employee or employees to learn not just how to input data but how to manipulate reports, queries and UDFs. I felt this program needed a designated architect to manage data. I would also consider the number of records. eTapestry is better suited for less than 10,000 records as I believe the value vs functionality declines considerably as the records increase. If you have 10,000+ donor records, you likely need a more sophisticated solution anyway.

Basically, you get what you pay for with eTapestry. I would recommend it to an organization that is moving away from excel or access data tracking or a simple organization that doesn't do several different things. If you have memberships and multiple events and peer-to-peer, I think you will find eTapestry lacking.