Powerful system, but pesky outages cause disruptions in day-to-day!
December 23, 2022

Powerful system, but pesky outages cause disruptions in day-to-day!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Reporting
  • Lists

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

We use NXT to manage our donor database of about 140,000 constituents for a large, public university, including alumni, parents, students, etc. My main concern is how frequently the platform or specific platform functions go down in outages. On Giving Tuesday, one of the largest fundraising events of the whole year, a key tool (RE Database View) was not accessible and down for many hours. This relates to another key concern, which is that our team still relies on the "old" version of Raiser's Edge (accessed through Database view) for some of our key, day-to-day functioning (like gift processing, managing memberships, and pulling specific queries). The cost in time and dollars is high and yet the service is undependable due to frequent outages and there are key functionalities that are not yet available in NXT yet.

Pros

  • Holistic View of Constituents
  • Offers Integrations with 3rd party tools for ease (ThankView, Live Alumni, etc)
  • Streamlined Lists functionality to make data reporting and pulling easier

Cons

  • Key Functionalities are missing from the new and supposedly updated program (managing memberships, creating and managing appeals, etc)
  • Numerous outages (especially on high-traffic days like Giving Tuesday)
  • Lack of key data points as usable fields in the Insights feature, making them unreportable
  • Lists
  • Reporting
  • Actions
  • Cut down on time for small-scale list pulling and sharing within teams
  • Replaced some of our dashboards with much more in-depth visualizations that can be modified faster
  • Provided a more accessible and user-friendly experience for frontline fundraisers
We have found that some of data intelligence (such as 'tags' of our donors as at-risk, lapsing, lapsed, higher giving potential, etc) have helped us work more efficiently. Int he past, we would have had separate queries for all of those populations, needed to adjust/modify them each year, and cross referencing all of the subsets of donors fitting into many of these categories would be challenging.
I thought their training was a major asset as the content they covered was thorough, well-taught, and engaging. However, managing the trainings internally was not as seamless and our team was bogged down by questions and troubleshooting on t he volume of trainings, who needed to take what, the licenses and log-in credentials, the costs that needed to get paid (or not paid because they were already included), etc etc.
Salesforce was a much more user-friendly, powerful system compared to Raiser's Edge Database view. Once we upgraded to NXT, I found a lot of similar functionalities and tools I was missing from Salesforce.

Do you think Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT's feature set?

Yes

Did Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT again?

Yes

It is well-suited for organizations with large frontline-fundraising teams who need their Development Officers to learn the platform fast and manage their day-to-day data entry in a more user-friendly way (compared to database view).

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