Raiser's Edge - not what it once was.
March 13, 2021
Raiser's Edge - not what it once was.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Raiser's Edge
Raiser's Edge is used by the majority of our fundraising country offices. In our office, we use Raiser's Edge as our main database to track all of our donors and all gifts/donations. It is also used by our finance department to reconcile our bank records with our donation records. It is mainly a tool for fundraising to track constituents and their donations.
- You can use Raiser's Edge to track all donations and constituents in an organized way so that you can get reports and queries on fundraising revenues and get constituent data to use for segmenting with your fundraising channels (ie. direct mail or email).
- Raiser's Edge uses funds, campaigns and appeals, and other tabs/categories that help to organize all information required for a constituent.
- Importing is made easier with tools such as import-o-matic.
- Blackbaud customer support is terrible and if anything fails, it takes forever to get anything resolved.
- Blackbaud [consistently] increases their fees without warning and charges several times for the same thing. They just added a new charge of $600/year to every client they claim to maintain the cost of keeping gifts in PCI compliance. They already charge $.25 per transaction for the same reason. If you have any issues with charges, you will most likely not get anywhere.
- Reporting is not the greatest. You have to be very careful with your queries or you won't get the right information. Canned reports are not easy to use.
- Sales tactics are crazy with having a Customer Service representative that is really only there for sales increases and not for customer support.
- Blackbaud spends a lot of time making shiny things but doesn't spend a lot of time on improving their actual products and they very often just abandon their solutions and no longer help service them whether you like it or not.
- It is getting harder to see the ROI as [positive] with using Raiser's Edge as the price continues to increase with no additional benefit.
Do you think Raiser's Edge delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Raiser's Edge's feature set?
No
Did Raiser's Edge live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Raiser's Edge go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Raiser's Edge again?
No