Item: Blackbaud eTapestry
Rating: 7
Author: Karly Wood

Overall Satisfaction with eTapestry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization utilizes eTapestry to manage all members and donors for our church. Currently, our entire organization uses the system to track families, relationships, giving and trends, and correspondence. It assists us in keeping updated and relevant data on our church body.

Pros and Cons

Pros

eTapestry makes it easy to enter and connect family members. This is important to us so that we can reach out to the appropriate people for events.
eTapestry has a variety of reporting options which assist us in gleaning data we need quickly.
eTapestry's management menu makes it easy to add additional users and get them up and running on the system. This is integral in getting the system broadly used and managed by a variety of ministry department heads.

Cons

It is not easy to manage pledge giving. If a donor gives on a recurring schedule through automatic credit card transitions, it is impossible to categorize the gift as a payment. I have to go into the transaction, reverse it, and then recreate the gift as a payment to count against the pledge.
The dashboard reports are not diverse enough. They often misrepresent data, especially by counting pledges made as "gifts received".
It is difficult to create your own reports if the standard reports do not represent the data you need.

Return on Investment

ETapestry allows us to have the most updated information to provide great customer service to our members. It is simple to add notes or update information upon talking to members, therefore improving our data each time we interact.
We also find it helpful that we can track attendance trends by matching attendee numbers to specific email contacts, which we store in eTapestry. We can improve our advertising by being able to see which events had great turn outs.
We highly trust the integrity of the data we store and trust it to generate annual giving statements, which are used for tax purposes of our members.

Likelihood to Renew

This product meets our needs and we find no need to change. It is integrated with our credit card processing portal and with our website. We also see the potential to track beyond what we use for now, including areas where people can serve the church, and what activities they have been a part of.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say eTapestry is great for small to midsize non-profit organizations. Because payments and gifts need to be entered by hand, it would be cumbersome for a large organization to use this program. The main issue here is the number of "clicks" it takes to even get to the "add gift" screen. There is no "one click" option.

Comments

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