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January 21, 2020
eTapestry is used as our primary CRM, primarily by the Development department.
- Customization of accounts
- Customization of contributions
- Email marketing
- Online web forms integrations are clunky
May 07, 2019
We use Blackbaud's eTapestry on a daily basis to track and record information about our constituency. The eTapestry program is ideal for a small organization such as ours. It allows for queries and reports needed in order to conduct business. Without eTapestry, we would be lost.
- Daily, we are entering data about our partners in mission. We use that data to create queries and to run reports. eTapestry has made our work easier.
- Our processes are now streamlined with eTapestry. We know what we need daily, weekly, monthly, etc. and eTapestry gets the work done for us.
- Deposits and credit card transactions are easily managed by eTapestry.
- We conduct a lot of donor visits. It would be nice to have a mapping option to layout donors in a certain area and map out the visits, rather than us using Google.
July 20, 2018
We are using eTapestry in our Development Department to track donors and prospective donors. It addresses the problem of tracking donations and being able to report on them in various ways.
- The constant contact interface makes it easy to send out e-newsletters and track who actually opens the emails. Makes reporting easy.
- It is good to be able to define the fields that are specific for your own needs along with some standard fields. Can make it work for exactly what we need.
- Customer service is very good. Their personnel are always friendly and knowledgeable.
- Putting in multiple email addresses in one field makes it hard to report out for mass emailing. Would like to see that field set up to handle multiple emails and be able to report each one separately.
- It would be nice to be able to change the look of some of the standard reports. Also, the information that goes into the standard reports.
- It would also be nice to be able to include soft credits in some reports where they do not currently show up.
July 03, 2018
We currently use eTapestry as our Donor Database as well as our CRM. We have updated from another database since last year and have been implementing different parts of the database into our website and daily use.
The system is used across the entire organization by every staff member.
The system is used across the entire organization by every staff member.
- Being able to add constituents and manage their contact information
- Being able to add and manage donations/payments, etc
- Run reports and lists that tell your story
- More connectivity. Being able to connect to other platforms or software
- More customization. It is a little monotonous and doesn't allow for total customization
- More design friendly. The different options to design things within the application lack creativity and ability to personalize.
November 10, 2017
eTapestry came along at a time when we were very frustrated by our previous donor management software. By comparison, eTapestry offered an improved interface, more powerful reporting options, and a module specifically intended to support our fundraising model. Since adopting eTapestry about four years ago, it's been used exclusively by staff members related to fundraising, communications, grants, and donor relations, but not at all by program staff.
- Mass updating: eTapestry includes very powerful tools for making mass changes to many (or all) of your constituent accounts at once.
- Mass emails: After moving to eTapestry, we were able to consolidate our mass email/communication efforts and drop our Constant Contact account. The tools eTap offers did the job just fine, and it was great to have all our data in one place.
- Queries: While I think eTapestry could improve by simplifying its approach to data sorting, I love being able to set up a query and then apply that query to communications, updates, and a whole host of reports.
- Interface: Some of our staff members never really got comfortable with the user interface. In many areas, it's unnecessarily cluttered and complicated.
- Pledges: The help forums are full of people begging for better pledge tools, including being able to apply gifts to pledges retrospectively.
- Queries: Like I said, I love some aspects of the queries and hate others. Building compound queries out of compound queries is bad enough, but when you need to then edit one? Ugh. Very overcomplicated, and there ARE better ways.
December 14, 2016
At FSL we use etapestry in the development and communications department. A total of 5 people have access to the database in the company with only 3 able to make changes to any information entered. This software has given us a single platform with which we track donations, donor levels, campaign progress, event attendance, and volunteer hours, as well as board member activity.
- User-friendly dashboard!
- Great training available for all users and user levels.
- Tracks campaign progress in a visible and easy to understand way.
- Handles multiple campaigns, funding areas and goals with ease.
- The query and reporting functions are somewhat limited and take a while to set up.
- User-defined fields could be more clear.
It effectively keeps track of constituents. It also provides an integrated platform between the online and offline word, thus making constituent communications timely, accurate and up to date. Our fundraising department uses this product.
- This software is very easy to use and it is also intuitive. There isn't much of a learning curve when it comes to this software, especially if you are used to more complicated CRMs.
- The support line is always helpful and if the support specialist can't help you, they will find the answer...all the way up to the product engineers if necessary. The best part about working with Blackbaud is that the company truly believes in your mission; they are there to help you leverage technology to meet your missional goals.
- The product is very linear. If you have multiple segments/complicated campaigns, I would not recommend this product.
December 09, 2015
eTapestry was used within the development department for the maintenance of contributions. It helped keep track of donors and what they donated. It allowed us to keep a database of addresses, names, notes and other information so that we could pursue healthy relationships with our community.
- The payment function is eTapestry is extremely user friendly. Worked very well at auctions and other events held by the organization.
- eTapestry retains a lot of information about your donors so that you can engage in meaningful relationships with them.
- eTapestry keeps your records organized well. It is easy to navigate the program.
- At times, eTapestry could be complicated because of all the different functions it provides.
December 08, 2015
eTapestry is Neighborhood Healthcare's donor management system. We currently utilize it in the Philanthropy and Communications Department to maintain our donor contact and gift information. Our accounting department has just recently been granted access to our reports in eTapestry so they have more accurate and timely information. We utilize their DIY Forms for our online donation page and online event ticket sales, and we regularly import and export information to maintain an accurate mailing list. eTapestry allows us to stay in contact with our donors in the manner in which they prefer.
- eTapestry provides great training for all levels of users. There is an easily searchable User Manual and Knowledgebase that are available at any time. In addition, eTapestry provides recorded training and live webinars with instructors that walk you through certain features.
- The DIY Forms are extremely user friendly. Even if you do not have any computer coding experience, they are self-explanatory and easy to implement onto your website.
- The diversity and amount of reports that are available are extremely helpful. The system already has recommended reports for general fundraising purposes, but additional reports can be customized for your specific needs.
- It would be extremely helpful if eTapestry allowed for multiple "sticky notes" to be added to account records. If there is a way, I'm currently not aware. We have different colored sticky notes for different types of notes and sometimes more than one sticky note applies.
- eTapestry integrates with Constant Contact, but it would be great if there were a module within eTapestry that allowed the user to creative attractive enewsletters/eblasts, from within eTapestry instead of needing yet another platform.
eTapestry works great for entering data concerning donations. At a non-profit organization, I would record monetary and supply donations (like clothing and bedding.) Since I would volunteer two times a month, I was thankful that eTapestry was easy to remember. It is also intuitive - easy to figure out how to use it for other needs.
- Intuitive.
- Easy to make corrections.
- Excellent for recording donations.
- It seems so basic.
I LOVE eTapestry. It is the most user-friendly database I've ever used. Ever. Easiest format for establishing LIMITED permissions for other staff and board members. HIGHLY recommend! The standard and benchmark reports are logical and can be viewed or exported in any format. The live chat tech support is the BEST I've ever used, ever.
- User friendly, best method for establishing permissions.
- Logical reports.
- I LOVE the dashboard.
It is being used for a development database. I am the power and primary user - however it is available to all members of development team.
- Field Flexibility
- Search Capability
- Report Design Flexibility
- Queries
- Love to have pop up help prompts
Our organization's development department uses eTapestry to track pledges and payments from individual and corporate donors, foundations and government funders.
- Tracks pledges and payments toward pledges well
- Not intuitive or user friendly
- Extremely difficult to create and run reports
- Clunky interface that is difficult to navigate
- Very slow
December 18, 2014
eTapestry is being used as our donor management database. We are a small organization and it is primarily used by our development team. I used eTapestry for similar purposes in a previous job, so I am the in-house trainer, so to speak. I also use it for my own work managing the organization's volunteers.
- It is easy to enter data.
- Finding a particular person's file is fairly easy.
- Its online support is really good. You can instant chat with folks from the company to walk you through questions or problems and that's helped me tremendously.
- I don't think it's easy to learn in comparison to other donor databases.
- Reports in particular are not user-friendly.
- Getting the reporting that you want can be difficult until you know the system really well.
My organization does not use eTapestry, but we have worked with a handful of clients that do. These organizations have all been small (<10 paid staff) organizations using it to manage donations. In each case, it is used primarily by the development staff, but reports are shared with everyone. Each organization implemented it in order to raise more money.
- Solid out of the box functionality. You don't have to spend any time thinking about how you plan to use it - you can get started right away. If you're just tracking individual donors (who may or may not be part of a family unit) this is a solid choice.
- A lot more functionality than the small, low-priced competitors that pop up all the time. Blackbaud has been doing this a long time, and they do understand raising money for nonprofits.
- Good support for paper mailings.
- Pricing usually isn't per user, so you can definitely share with the whole organization.
- Good tech support - responsive and knowledgeable.
- Integrated email marketing and payment processor, both perfectly reasonable.
- Good de-duplication functionality.
- Grants management is theoretically available, but in my opinion, more trouble than it is worth. Most clients seem to decide it makes more sense to just use a spreadsheet, and I can't really argue.
- It is definitely built to track families that donate rather than foundations, corporations, or other "organizations." It can be done, but all the organizations I've worked with wind up with poor-quality data about organizations because it isn't too easy to track this correctly in eTap. If you're just tracking individual donors, this won't be a problem for you.
- I don't actually have a problem with the UI, but all the clients I've talked to hate it. They feel that it is cluttered and old looking, and they feel like they do a lot of clicking to get to what they want. When I give them something they're happier with, I don't know that I'm saving them that many clicks, but they say they like other things a lot more.
- The reporting is acceptable, but a little clunky. A report preview in the window where you're building a report would save a lot of time. I've worked with people who are capable of creating reports in eTap, but find it so difficult that they wind up using spreadsheets instead.
- Because it is built as an old-school software product, it doesn't have an API. You can't connect to anything else, and you can't build new functionality for your organization. (In this respect, I'm biased towards competitor Salesforce.com, which has an open API an an appexchange of 1000+ apps.)
- Pricing is pretty inconsistent, at least to my knowledge. I've seen similar organizations reporting wildly different prices to me. I just hope that they're giving me inaccurate information.
- Tracking constituent's participation in different things is limited. You can create new checkboxes to indicate that someone came to your gala or volunteered, but those checkboxes seem to get out of control pretty quickly.
August 08, 2014
My organization switched to eTapestry nearly five years ago. Right after we switched it was purchased by Blackbaud, the nonprofit database giant. I suspect Blackbaud just isn't investing in the product, though I don't know that for a fact. For a cloud-based solution, it has been updated rarely and just isn't keeping up with trends, nor has it over the last 4.5 years.
We selected the product to address the problem of staff storing contact records in multiple places. It has failed as a solution for that problem. We hoped to use it for event attendance tracking, but it has not worked out for that. We wanted to use it to track donation records and that is a place where it has succeeded. We also use it to email our email list.
We originally wanted this to be the database that the entire organization used to track contacts, but users found it clunky and so adoption was low. It is no longer being used by the entire organization and is now just used by 3-5 people who use it for contact tracking, mass emailing, and donation tracking.
- eTapestry succeeds as a donation tracking system. You can easily enter donation records and can report on those records.
- The mass email part of eTapestry works and has decent reporting capabilities. It's forms are outdated and the email editor is clunky, so most users accustomed to more current tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact will find it frustrating.
- The main problem with eTapestry is that it lags in keeping up with current competitors. It feels outdated and abandoned. The user interface is terrible, which leads to constant complaints from staff. None of the actions are intuitive, so users feel like they have to search for minutes to figure out how to do the most basic things. People started using other software for the same functions eTapestry provides, which has left us with multiple email lists in different places, and a file that has duplicates, triplicates, or worse. We are going to be leaving eTapestry because of these problems.
- There is no integration with social media. Competing products have moved ahead and are making social media a part of all of their contact profiles, but I don't believe eTapestry offers any kind of social media appending.
- There is inadequate unpaid training. The training modules offered are expensive, and staff have not been happy with them in the past. Since the software is not very intuitive, there is an increased need for training. This puts us in a bind.
- They are slow to respond to concerns. I've been sending out warning signals that we were considering leaving for years, and it has taken up to a year to get a response to a bad review that they solicited themselves. My concerns about areas where they are lagging behind competition have been brushed over. There are some important things they need to address that are not even on their radar. The mobile site is terrible and they are uninterested in streamlining mobile login.
- The site is slow. When you are updating records, the site should be speedier. This is not a browser issue-this is based on years of experience on multiple browsers and multiple computers. Mass emails can take up to 24 hours to be delivered.
Our organization utilizes eTapestry to manage all members and donors for our church. Currently, our entire organization uses the system to track families, relationships, giving and trends, and correspondence. It assists us in keeping updated and relevant data on our church body.
- eTapestry makes it easy to enter and connect family members. This is important to us so that we can reach out to the appropriate people for events.
- eTapestry has a variety of reporting options which assist us in gleaning data we need quickly.
- eTapestry's management menu makes it easy to add additional users and get them up and running on the system. This is integral in getting the system broadly used and managed by a variety of ministry department heads.
- It is not easy to manage pledge giving. If a donor gives on a recurring schedule through automatic credit card transitions, it is impossible to categorize the gift as a payment. I have to go into the transaction, reverse it, and then recreate the gift as a payment to count against the pledge.
- The dashboard reports are not diverse enough. They often misrepresent data, especially by counting pledges made as "gifts received".
- It is difficult to create your own reports if the standard reports do not represent the data you need.
eTapestry was used to process donations and to manage donor data.
- It's a great entry-level donor data system for small nonprofits. It's a great alternative to more generalized small-scale database products like Access and FileMaker Pro.
- It allows for easy searching of donor data.
- It provides an easy way to export donor data for mailing lists, financial reports, etc.
- It's a very simple system so it doesn't allow for tracking more complex types of giving like split gifts.
- The data entry options are limited and only so many fields can be created.
July 30, 2014
We use eTapestry in the Development department. It's a very powerful tool that helps us keep track of complex and extensive donor information, pull reports with all sorts of data types, and manage correspondence to an extensive donor list. It helps us ensure that information is accurate, that we contact people on time, that our accounting is 100% accurate, and that we meet our fundraising goals. We also use the online product sales feature for fundraising campaigns involving peer-to-peer fundraising and selling promotional items.
- eTapestry's correspondence functions are amazing. We can rely on its powerful reporting functions to pull accurate lists for things like pledge payments, thank-you letters, lapsed pledges, and all sorts of other campaigns.
- The online training functions are so helpful. You can study at your own pace and go as deep as you want, because just about every function is covered in great detail. It also makes training easier, because the supervisor doesn't have to explain everything whenever we hire a new staff member.
- eTapestry support is thorough, timely, and friendly. They've helped us solve many problems. My favorite part is that they can look into your account to see what you need to do. If I'm trying to pull a report and I know it's not working right, a support person can see how I've set up the report and can explain, all via online chat, what I need to change to get what I'm looking for. They must be experts in the software.
- The interface could be modernized a bit, but it's really not that bad at all.
- When it exports a long batch of letters to Word, everything is in table format and it takes a bit longer to perfect the formatting just the way I like it.
- I really can't think of anything else. We regularly have chats about how great eTapestry is.
August 17, 2014
eTapestry was used to track donations to our Benevolent Care Fund, our Benefit Gala, memorial gifts, and any other donations. It was used by our Stewardship Manager and I was the person to input the donations and generate the letters.
- Generates professional acknowledgement letters
- Easy to learn
- Defaults make multiple entries easier
- I had difficulty running reports, but it may be because our Corporate Office didn't give me permission. Or, that I didn't use that feature much at all, so it could be my own lack of experience in that aspect.
We used it to email our supporters about different events and fundraisers our organization was having.
- Email segmentation
- Email creation
- Analytics
- Templates
- Ecommerce
- Minimizing all the tabs
December 09, 2015
We use eTapestry to maintain a database of our contacts (about 30,000) and send them newsletters with updates on our work, notify them of events, ask for donations, etc. It is not being used across the organization, but rather by a handful of people in communications and finance. We use it mostly to keep track of our constituents, especially as many of our employees do a lot of networking at conferences, etc.
- The ability to have multiple users who can navigate the site and once and use it for different things.
- The availability of online tutorials is helpful.
- Easy to use templates, once they are designed.
- Much of it is counter intuitive -- for instance, the whole process of creating UDFs and storing them can be very complicated, and the menus in which they appear are not straightforward either. It doesn't feel like the program understands that it would be most helpful to keep the most used tools available in menus, etc., instead of having to go search for them deep down in lists full of UDFs.
- The forms that have to be filled to create accounts have a lot of extraneous info that leads to the possibility of a lot of duplicates, bad accounts, etc. Too much info!
- Not enough of a filter for creating duplicates -- I think the requirements to make an account should be more strict and the filter should be better for duplicates.
December 08, 2015
We used eTapestry as a CRM to manage our relationships - donors, volunteers and those who contribute to our organization in-kind. We managed approaches within eTapestry (such as person-to-person connections and/or annual appeal), we managed campaigns (such as the direct mail campaign or #GivingTuesday) and we kept a profile of key stakeholders using the note functionality. We also integrated eTapestry as the online giving platform of our website and managed all acknowledgments an end of year tax letters.
- Automated acknowledgments from online donations.
- Manage constituents and keep profile of key stakeholders.
- Cloud-based tool that is accessible from any location.
- Cumbersome reporting tools.
- Too many steps to generate a solid mailing list.
- Lack of integration with accounting software is unfortunate.
eTapestry is used to record all donations that are received by our non-profit organization. It is a way to log constituents and donations in an organized and efficient way. It is also used so that we have another record of donations, aside from accounting.
- eTapestry has a strong customer service team that will give you step by step instructions if you are struggling with any processes.
- eTapestry has potential to better its thank you options. I would love to be able to auto populate thank yous in a fast and user-friendly way.
- The look of eTapestry could be improved, I think that a re-design my be helpful to simplify the website and draw customers in as it is not very inviting at this time.
- I would like to see an easier way to create queries and run reports. eTapestry does have an excellent support team but I would like to see a more intuitive site.
- I see room for improvement in compatibility with other donation sites and programs.
eTapestry was being used only by the Development department. It housed all of our donor contact information, in addition to, donations, volunteer hours, pledges, and monthly gifts. Aside from individual donors, it housed organization gifts as well and grants.
- Capture donor information
- Track donations
- Track if an individual is a donor and/or volunteer.
- End user customizations of fields/page layouts
- More detailed reporting
- Fund/Source code capabilities.
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
Yes - Yes, the upgraded release was just fine and fixed a few bug issues.
eTapestry Scorecard Summary
What is eTapestry?
eTapestry® is designed to help small and growing nonprofits achieve better fundraising results. The vendor says this solution includes a new design and innovative features as well as an analytics suite that enables users to harness the power of data and boost fundraising efforts.
Categories: Nonprofit Fundraising, Nonprofit CRM
eTapestry Competitors
eTapestry Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |