Item: Blackbaud eTapestry
Rating: 7
Author: Glenna Harkins

Overall Satisfaction with eTapestry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

eTapestry is being used as our donor management database. We are a small organization and it is primarily used by our development team. I used eTapestry for similar purposes in a previous job, so I am the in-house trainer, so to speak. I also use it for my own work managing the organization's volunteers.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It is easy to enter data.
Finding a particular person's file is fairly easy.
Its online support is really good. You can instant chat with folks from the company to walk you through questions or problems and that's helped me tremendously.

Cons

I don't think it's easy to learn in comparison to other donor databases.
Reports in particular are not user-friendly.
Getting the reporting that you want can be difficult until you know the system really well.

Return on Investment

Better customer service- the web based design makes it easy for multiple people in an organization to access information on a donor or customer.
Because it's not very user friendly, and I've worked in small shops, people have gotten frustrated with the reporting features....that part has gone slowly.
I personally thought it helped us organize our files, increase revenue from mailings, and connect better with donors.

Likelihood to Renew

I think that for the price, it allows us to do everything that we need to do for our development functions. Also, it has the capacity to connect to our website and do e-commerce, all of which would be difficult to set up with another type of system.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think that if you invest the time to learn the system, it is able to do everything that you need it to do. It's also pretty inexpensive as donor databases go. I will say that it's probably best suited to a work environment where someone is going to specialize in its use. It's not user friendly enough for a one-person shop where a development person has many other competing priorities. It can be frustrating unless you put that time in.

eTapestry Reliability

Reliability and Availability

I have never had an issue accessing eTapestry. It does occasionally go down for maintenance. When that happens, they give you a lot of notice and generally schedule maintenance for hours between midnight and 6am so that business won't be disrupted.

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