Blackbaud eTapestry

We are a small fundraising team and started with a small number of supporters. Blackbaud eTapestry suited us as the price was acceptable (although not cheap). It does everything we need it do for a small, growing charity.

Very easy to use.

When we want to send a mass email to our donors and/or other contacts, Blackbaud eTapestry provides the tools to make it happen. That being said, when someone wants to unsubscribe from one of our email lists, but not all of them, eTapestry does not have a way to do that. If someone hits the Unsubscribe button, it unsubscribes them from everything. So it depends on what your needs are regarding that setting. The DIY Form settings were recently upgraded to allow us to send a different confirmation email based on whether a donor gave a one-time donation or a recurring donation. This is such a valuable option, as we previously had donors contact us to double-check that they had set up a monthly donation online, as the previous confirmation email didn't say (since that setting wasn't available). I'm not sure if the communication templates can distinguish between a monthly, weekly, or quarterly recurring donation, so we removed the weekly and quarterly options from our donation page and directly added "monthly" to the communication template.

The query and reports are helpful aspects of eTapestry, but it takes a while to learn. Once a user has a better grasp on queries and reports, eTapestry helps to really narrow down searches for users, hone in on specific needs and desires, and give insight as needed. Sometimes the problem lies in the information previously gathered on donors and often in the 'guess and check' nature of learning the query and reports. This is not ideal for those without much CRM experience or who are crunched for time.

Tracking donor information and reports work well. I am new to this software and normally the only person who uses it. Others who use it on occasion are frustrated because they don't understand how to do what they want. I wonder if some of the challenges with documents I have may be that I still need more understanding. Maybe they will solve themselves as I learn. Or maybe they are just not as easy as other products. We some times create documents for email outside of eTapestry because it is easier to get what we want, then import to eTapestry as an image for a mass email.

The features for donation pages and processing donations work well with Blackbaud Merchant Services.
If an organization has a lot of money to spend on set-up and staff training it might be a good fit. It's not very user friendly for self-teaching.

Reporting of my campaigns TY to LY. The process to get this reporting is very easy.

Being able to send emails to our entire database or to a small specialized group of our donors.

Being able to insert personalized field's into the communications really elevates the letters we write to the donors.

Blackbaud worked well to run a report on student information for grant reporting.

Blackbaud eTapestry works well for logging in donations. It is quite difficult to get a report with cumulative totals.

While it is not as robust as Raiser's Edge (also a Blackbaud product), Blackbaud eTapestry is a solid application that is, overall, a strong tool for an organization that includes fundraising in its activities. It is a good value for the money. It is well suited for managing and tracking donor relationships, recording donations, and producing charitable donation tax receipts.

When I am trying to prepare a mailing list for particular donors, I usually construct a report with any possible information I might need, download it into excel, and sort there. The disadvantage is that you can't put a record of that communication on a donor's account.
However, trying to do this sorting in the database itself is very unwieldy, involving many separate queries. It gets complicated, so I don't usually do that.

Sometimes, I construct a query and look at it in preview only to find it includes things that I have specifically tried to eliminate. I guess the query is not constructed correctly but I don't have any idea how to fix this sort of thing.

eTapestry is a great solution for startup nonprofits or organizations with a smaller amount of financial supporters. If the majority of your queries are simple and don't require narrowing your base down into very specific groups, you can get the information you need. It's more of a burden if you're dealing with complicated donor segmentation, need quick, on the fly reporting, and if you expect all employees of your organization to use it to its fullest potential. If you've used Raiser's Edge NXT, eTapestry is like that but stripped down and made to be more complicated.

eTapestry is well suited for small organizations that want a high quality database at a manageable cost. It is a great alternative to some of Blackbaud's more robust products that are too much for a small organization.

It's great for donor database management of grants. It's not great at helping to plan reminders (e.g. birthdays, anniversaries, pledge follow ups, etc.)

This product is expensive, hard to follow, and the reporting is awful. Smaller nonprofits would be better served by any number of competitors, or by a simple Excel sheet. Larger nonprofits would be better served by a more customizable product like Salesforce.

I think it is a great program and has tons of potential for my organization. It has taken me a while to learn it, as I use it at a part-time position and have had no training. Self-teaching is not always the quickest, but I do eventually learn. If you want to keep track of donors, campaigns, and donations, this makes it a much easier process than no process at all or trying to coordinate spreadsheets from different programs.

Blackbaud eTapestry is definitely better suited for small and budding organizations. It is a solid CRM for donor management and report pulling, but in terms of fundraising help (giving pages), integration with other platforms (income processing, email marketing, event management), and customizable features (like tagging, analytical information, etc.), it is lacking. This is not for organizations looking for totally centralized software. It is, however, great for those who are looking for their first CRM to help with keeping donor information organized and easily accessible.

Blackbaud eTapestry isn't the most adaptable system in our experience. When we've wanted to pull specific data, it isn't as easy as we'd like it to be. We've spent many hours with Blackbaud support trying to figure out how to make eTapestry pull the data that we're looking for, and ultimately it's felt like a pretty big time sink. In addition to that, once we reached 1,000 donors, our cost increased, which is challenging for a small nonprofit.

I like its ability to show how many accounts don't have email addresses or have opted out of our mailing. When printing and mailing out thank you cards, it offers the option to make a note of the contact, but since I sometimes go back and forth before officially mailing it out, it's not always accurate but could be if there was an "initiated" option and then a follow-up option that confirms the offline action was completed.

Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited to an organization or company that has many types of users or constituents. Having a dedicated person or small team to manage the database is key. As we are finding, it is only as useful as the data put into it. Stale and irregular updates do not give an accurate picture of the organization's database. In my opinion, a small organization may be overwhelmed by Blackbaud eTapestry unless a scalable version can be crafted to suit their needs.

Affordable for smaller nonprofits that cannot afford Raisers Edge from Blackbaud. The pricing tiers can be more suited to these smaller organizations. For example, charges are determined by how many constituents are in the database. The lowest tier is 5000 constituents. If you go over that, the next tier is at 10,000 constituents. There should be a pricing tier in between, such as 7500 constituents. That's a big jump to make for smaller organizations.

Blackbaud eTapestry is well suited for organizations that will have numerous users. We have multiple schools that work together to provide the best educational experience, and Blackbaud eTapestry keeps us organized and consistent. The greatest challenge is getting the reports you need. It can be a challenging system when it comes to reports and lists.

It does not offer text correspondence with donors. The designs for emails, letters, and forms are very limited. The report options are plentiful but very complicated. Other donor database vendors have kept up with new technology and ways to reach donors, but eTapestry has not. It seems antiquated and limits our ability to reach younger donors.

It is best suited to very small non-profits with small budgets. It is a very basic donor database.