Not recommended unless you have a large enough staff to balance multiple systems to make BB NXT work for your organization.
December 24, 2022

Not recommended unless you have a large enough staff to balance multiple systems to make BB NXT work for your organization.

Elissa Rowley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

We purchased Raiser's Edge NXT to move our organization to a new level of data management (moved from GiftWorks) and to support our continuously growing, small organization. We receive much support from individuals, civic organizations, and schools from across the globe. Our hope (which we expressed before purchasing) was to streamline our data management and move away from using multiple platforms to accept donations (one-time, recurring, and peer-to-peer). We also track peer-to-peer fundraising for multiple reasons (annual contests and sponsorship tracking). This required a lot of manual tracking, and NXT promised to move us to "a click of a button" type of data management.

Pros

  • Support has been helpful and easy to use.
  • The look and "feel" of NXT is nice.
  • Several features like actions, appeals, and relationships have been helpful in our communication management.

Cons

  • We were told in 2020 of the many things NXT can do - most of those were not true.
  • We were told by all BB products "talk to each other" from high-level executives. This also turned out to be false, resulting in us purchasing outside products to connect BB products together and requiring a lot of education to learn how to manage this connecter product.
  • Features in NXT were supposed to be available in 2021 - many have still not come to fruition, and we manage data using database view and NXT.
  • Peer-to-peer (though we use Luminate/Convio, which is a product BB purchased and has cobbled to be used with their system. Luminate does not "talk" to NXT. We needed to purchase a third-party product to connect Luminate to NXT and transfer our data.
  • Online donation forms - again, we lost features (donor cover, honorarium) when switching to BB.
  • We have not seen an increase in funds raised due to BB - we haven't been able to fully utilize the data mining power due to the length of time to have our needs met.
  • We aren't saving time - fundraising has not been consolidated into a "single system".
We're getting there - but have not been able to fully analyze and utilize the "data intelligence" provided by BB.
  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
Depending on the training - the basic level helped get us into the system. Now we're seeing new "training" often end with a sales pitch and a requirement to purchase a new product.
Classy's interface for peer-to-peer fundraising is sleek and functional. Luminate/Convio (TeamRaiser) is clunky and difficult for users to use. They are often confused about where to make changes to their fundraising pages. GiftWorks was our previous database and was ancient. BB has been a step up simply due to the age of that system.

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?

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

Well suited for people who have been using the system for a long time or organizations with basic needs that do not require multiple BB systems to be connected. For the cost of the system, it is clear that BB is not focused on supporting non-profits. They are a for-profit company, and though they have wonderful lower-level staff, the overarching goals (unknown to me) do not seem to align with a non-profit needs.

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