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The Good, Bad, and Ugly
August 15, 2014

The Good, Bad, and Ugly

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Other

Overall Satisfaction with eTapestry

eTapestry was being used only by the Development department. It housed all of our donor contact information, in addition to, donations, volunteer hours, pledges, and monthly gifts. Aside from individual donors, it housed organization gifts as well and grants.
  • Capture donor information
  • Track donations
  • Track if an individual is a donor and/or volunteer.
  • End user customizations of fields/page layouts
  • More detailed reporting
  • Fund/Source code capabilities.
  • Ability to track donor information in one place instead of using spreadsheets or ACT
  • Better customer service, in that we were able to see if one was a donor and/or volunteer to thank them for both
  • Negative - user friendliness of the reporting and page layout customizing
eTapestry is better than PIDI, but not as good as Salesforce or the Luminate products for this particular organization. PIDI is less customizable and the reporting is worse than eTapestry that it is not really supported. Salesforce is open source platform and can be easily customized. Luminate is also all around good with customizing and reporting.
eTapestry does not meet the needs of the organization as a whole, in addition to the 5 year strategic plan. The organization continues to grow and needs additional resources to track data.
It is well suited for the small nonprofit looking to track a small set of data. For a larger organization, that has multi-channel fundraising - it is not appropriate. It is not good for those that partake in direct mail, telemarketing, plus email marketing. I would be sure that the organization knows it's 5 year strategic plan prior to purchasing a database.

Using eTapestry

3 - Staff members that use eTapestry are primarily in Development department. Adding donations, adding volunteers/hours, pulling thank you letters are the three functions of Development that used eTapestry.
1 - The database administrator is the only person in-house to support eTapestry. When they cannot fix the problem they contact support for additional help to resolve any issues.
  • Tracking donor information
  • Seeing if a donor is a volunteer as well
  • Tracking volunteer hours
  • Pulling acknowledgements fairly easy with customizations

Evaluating eTapestry and Competitors

  • Price
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
The most important factor was price. As a nonprofit, you need to stay within budget and allocate majority of your resources to the mission. The organization did not have any grants to help cover the cost.
I would evaluate additional products and not go with one product because of particular employees biased opinion due to the owner of the product.

eTapestry Implementation

The organization as fairly happy with the implementation in that the data was all in the right places. However as they continued to grow, they outgrew eTapestry's functions.
  • Don't know
  • Timeliness
  • Cost
  • Time management for small development department

eTapestry Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
In person training is always helpful for a new product however I think that the online tutorials would do just fine.
The online tutorials were easy to follow and explained in detail steps. I was able to put together an organization SOP for best practices in case I was not in the office or no longer there.
Yes, the product had lots of documentation and tutorials to help learn the system. It is not too difficult to understand, except for reporting. I would definitely recommend creating a SOP for your best business practices.

Configuring eTapestry

I think that it is too limited and not able to change where the fields go and the page layouts. However, you get what you pay for.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code

eTapestry Support

I had good experience with the support team to help me with reports and adding fields.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
I was unable to pull an extensive report. eTapestry allows you to link multiple reports together and then subtract out the ones that overflow. I could not get the report to pull what I needed so support had to go in to the system and create it for me so that it would be accurate.

Using eTapestry

Was not a great fit for the organization.
ProsCons
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Quick to learn
Feel confident using
Familiar
Do not like to use
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Cumbersome
  • Adding accounts
  • Adding donations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Reports
  • Customizing fields
  • Customizing page layouts

eTapestry Reliability

The product overall is not too bad but I would not suggest for a large nonprofit organization.
eTapestry is not software supported so it can be accessed anywhere. Just be sure to have the access key because you cannot login on a different computer for security reasons without an administrator approving it.
The product does what it is supposed to, although there are downsides. There are positive and negatives for every product. This is less expensive alternative for a small organization tracking minimum information.

Integrating eTapestry

Never used integration.
  • none
Did not integrate with any other systems.
  • Constant Contact
Not sure.
None.
Never used integration.

Relationship with Blackbaud

Blackbaud was good to work with during the entire process and even thereafter.
Blackbaud was good to work with during the entire process and even thereafter.
Don't recall.
Be sure to review contracts and make sure that product does exactly what you need it to for the next 3-5+ years.

Upgrading eTapestry

Yes - Yes, the upgraded release was just fine and fixed a few bug issues.
  • Faster turnaround when processing donations
  • Relationship association with donors
  • Not sure.