Raiser's Edge

Setting up queries, exports, and reports can be difficult for the novice user, but I think they are still reasonably intuitive.

Events Module and Volunteer module overlap and I was not sure which of them to use for recording volunteer participation

volunteer module is pretty cumbersome (while you can record a lot of information, it requires a lot of time and effort)

Queries and reports other than custom ones.

Sometimes the dashboard numbers don’t always match the query numbers.

Exports and Queries

Details within the membership module

guest records in events can sometimes be cumbersome if you have lots of "name unknown" guests attending

The volunteer module is pretty rigid in the set up - and is written to be used for ANNUAL events like walk-a-thons etc. We have volunteer needs every month so we had to work around these limitations to get it to work.

Virtually anything involving integration of data with another system (whether it's a Blackbaud system or a third-party system) is fraught with excitement and danger.

Canned reports are poorly documented and provided without "drill down" or support of the summary numbers. It's 12... that's all, just 12, with no "backup" or "drill down" to say how they got to the 12. Trust us... we're from Blackbaud and we're here to help. Suggested use of Crystal Reports is, in my opinion, just a cash cow for them to sell more training sessions; implementation of reporting using Crystal is cumbersome at best and trivial at worst.

ugh doesn't say enough about this.

Reports really require thoughtful consideration and understanding of how it pulls data and the connections

Crystal Reports