Minimal improvements to RE database view, with a lot of pain points still remaining
December 14, 2022
Minimal improvements to RE database view, with a lot of pain points still remaining
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
I use NXT mostly to enter Actions and Notes into the records of donors after completing cultivating steps or finding out background information about them. I also use it to identify information about a donor if they're calling and need some background details about prior gifts or whether or not we received a gift. In terms of data analytics, we are also in the process of building out dashboards to display KPIs such as retention rates, revenue, etc.
- Analytics dashboard are helpful are user friendly
- General layout of donor information is displayed in a clean way
- In some ways it has more functionality than RE database version, such as clickable links within each record that bounce to related pages
- Very limited ability to run queries. I have to open up the database view to do that.
- If I am logged into the database version of RE, after too much time of inactivity it breaks the connection and I need to manually break the a data connection and the process takes about 10 minutes. Very time consuming and unnecessary in my opinion.
- The giving history cuts off after a certain number of entries. If I want to see the comprehensive giving history, I need to log into the database view, which takes longer to load.
- In my opinion, the contact info is not entirely intuitive and is missing some bits of information that would organize it in a clean way. For example, I want to be able to indicate if a donor unsubscribed to bulk emails vs. emails we should never contact even for individual outreach.
- There is no option to check of text message as a method of contact.
- I would like to see a service that scans phone numbers and tells you if they're cell phones or landlines.
- In my expereince customer service is generally not helpful and difficult to reach.
- Even though we use Luminate Online, another Blackbaud product, we have no way of automatically recording which emails a donor received. There has also been no movement on fixing this issue.
- Integration with Raiser's Edge database
- Web-based donor information access
- Ease of adding actions and notes
- We have saved a little bit of time because there are some functions that operate more quickly on NXT compared to RE database view.
- The analytics dashboard is something RE database view didn't have.
- The remote access to the website allows for more flexibility if employees are traveling and don't have access to the VPN network.
This has been a strong point. We are still building out the systems, but the insights gained so far are very astute and the options NXT presents are interesting points of observation. The layout is also pretty clean and easy to understand.
- Online Training
NXT is better than DonorPerfect, but it has also been about 15 years since I last used DonorPerfect so I don't know if it's a fair comparison. I had only limited use of NetCommunity, but I do remember they had a tab that did track the emails we sent to donors on each of their records, which is not something that NXT has. GlobalGiving is a crowdfunding platform mostly, but I can say their customer support is much better than NXT, since GlobalGiving always tries to answer questions and address problems.
Do you think Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT's feature set?
No
Did Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT go as expected?
No
Would you buy Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT again?
No