eTapestry, better than the rest....until it's not.
November 10, 2017

eTapestry, better than the rest....until it's not.

Michelle Green Arnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with eTapestry

eTapestry came along at a time when we were very frustrated by our previous donor management software. By comparison, eTapestry offered an improved interface, more powerful reporting options, and a module specifically intended to support our fundraising model. Since adopting eTapestry about four years ago, it's been used exclusively by staff members related to fundraising, communications, grants, and donor relations, but not at all by program staff.
  • Mass updating: eTapestry includes very powerful tools for making mass changes to many (or all) of your constituent accounts at once.
  • Mass emails: After moving to eTapestry, we were able to consolidate our mass email/communication efforts and drop our Constant Contact account. The tools eTap offers did the job just fine, and it was great to have all our data in one place.
  • Queries: While I think eTapestry could improve by simplifying its approach to data sorting, I love being able to set up a query and then apply that query to communications, updates, and a whole host of reports.
  • Interface: Some of our staff members never really got comfortable with the user interface. In many areas, it's unnecessarily cluttered and complicated.
  • Pledges: The help forums are full of people begging for better pledge tools, including being able to apply gifts to pledges retrospectively.
  • Queries: Like I said, I love some aspects of the queries and hate others. Building compound queries out of compound queries is bad enough, but when you need to then edit one? Ugh. Very overcomplicated, and there ARE better ways.
  • It was aligned with our fundraising model (though that is no longer the case), which directly supported and guided our fundraising efforts, to great success.
  • It significantly reduced the amount of time spent laboring over grant reports that sometimes ask for very complicated financial updates.
  • Its mass update tools allowed us to clean our data ourselves, instead of paying for extra data services from eTap/Blackbaud.
  • Its mass communication tools allowed us to save money and consolidate our data.
eTapestry was light years ahead of DonorPerfect when we made that switch, and there was a special eTap module that tied in with our fundraising model. Recently, eTap and that fundraising company parted ways, and we were introduced to Bloomerang instead.

If we'd tried Bloomerang and disliked it or found it to offer no improvements, we'd have stayed with eTapestry (anyone who's ever moved all their data from one place to another knows it can be tedious, complicated, and it better be worth the hassle!), but we instantly found Bloomerang to be a breath of fresh air and our administrative staff has found it to be significantly simpler to use in almost every way. We've also found their staff to be incredibly helpful and very well-versed in our fundraising strategy specifically and the needs of nonprofits in general. Many Bloomerang people are former eTap people, so it makes sense that they'd have a good understanding of how to make improvements that would be particularly exciting to eTap users.
We're actually in the process of migrating to a new donor management database that we found to be much simpler to use and report from. I'd still recommend eTapestry to organizations where the users will be able to get up to speed quickly and not feel overwhelmed, but I'd recommend something else for an org that would be relying on less tech savvy users or volunteers for data entry and reporting.