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

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.

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.