Raiser's Edge

We use Raiser's Edge to manage constituents, process and track gifts to the school, use actions and the Proposals tool to process moves management and track where a donor is in the process of making a gift (qualification, solicitation, stewardship, etc.). We use it to pull queries, exports and reports used for mailing lists, event/invitation lists, financial reports, financial reconciliation reports with our school's Business Office, Attributes to track various activities and positions held by constituents, constituency codes to manage our people (students, alumni, current parents, alumni parents, Board of Trustees, etc.).

Raiser's Edge is used by two independent departments within our organization. Each department uses RE to process, record, track and report on fundraising; although, the processes and systems used by each department are inconsistent. The primary fundraising department solicits institutions only and uses Raiser's Edge as a CRM, as well as to track Prospect Research, Proposals and Actions. The secondary fundraising department solicits primarly individuals and uses RE as a rolodex to support direct mail, but does not use it for donor segmentation and targeted analytics, Prospect Research, Proposals or Actions. We leverage RE to maintain consistent and targeted communication with donors/prospects and to avoid duplication of communicaton to donors/prospects by various individuals/departments.

Raiser's Edge was the constituent and grants management tool. It was used to track all donors, prospects, many employees and any grant relationship. The philanthropy department used this product to keep track of what was soliciting each prospect, and the status of grant proposals. It was used to generate reports for senior management, internal reporting controls, and to also track performance measures. It helps the organization to address the problem of keeping track of prospects, and donors and their giving history. It also helped us move donors from one giving category to another one.

My organization used Raiser's Edge as our main donor database and CRM. We tracked everything from direct mail to event income in the database. It worked extremely well in all areas we needed to use it in. Reports were easy to run. The Dashboards were clear. And Blackbaud, who owns Raiser's Edge offers wonderful courses to catch your staff up on how to use the software accurately. The most helpful class was for the senior executives and how they can use the database. Them knowing what they can and can't ask for is very helpful.

I worked directly with the fundraising team at Catholic Charities. We used this software to keep record of donations both in-kind and monetary, as well as for targeted campaigns and upcoming events.

The Raiser's Edge is used in our Advancement office as our database for alumni/ae, current students and families and other donors. With it we track all donations and interactions with these constituents in Raiser's Edge.

We used The Raiser's Edge at Make-A-Wish Illinois for a variety of different aspects. We used the main NOAH Portal for all of our database entry, donor information, and fundraising management. We also used the team fundraising portion as well which included website functionalities. Our entire organization used it. Sometimes we would run into issues with reports because it can be a little complex to pull them and get the specific information. We were fortunate enough to have an IT Manager who handled a lot of this for us but that was probably the biggest hurdle. We also ran into some issues with duplicate records. There's no easy way to identify and delete duplicates.