Some benefits now, and hope for more in the future
August 09, 2016
Some benefits now, and hope for more in the future
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Raiser's Edge NXT
It is being used primarily by our Resource Development department, but other departments also access Raiser's Edge NXT as needed to assist our development work. The benefits of upgrading to NXT from Raiser's Edge 7 have already been pretty significant for us - it's increased use of Raiser's Edge by our staff because the new interface is much easier to navigate, and has also allowed us to provide access to selected donor profiles to board members who are involved in fundraising for our organization (because we now have unlimited seats in Raiser's Edge, and because board members can access Raiser's Edge NXT from any device with an internet connection, rather than needing to install an unwieldy software package). This has increased our fundraising capacity.
- The user interface is much more intuitive and easier to navigate.
- It's easy to assign donor portfolios to each user and each user has a customized action screen showing the status of each of their assigned donors.
- Graphic representations of giving history and contact history for each donor make it much easier to see whether it's time for another contact, whether an ask should be made, and what size ask we should make.
- It would be nice to be able to pull more complex reports/queries out of Raiser's Edge (RE) NXT. The filtering ability that currently exists in NXT is helpful for getting some basic lists, but if you want anything more complexity you currently still have to go into the "database view." Looking forward to this functionality being added to the NXT interface.
- The addition of the "Analyze" feature that shows performance of particular campaigns or appeals is great. I would love to be able to develop a dashboard of campaigns or appeals I select so that I can see the performance of more than one thing without having to change the filters each time I want to look at a different item.
- Operational Efficiency
- Increased revenue from new donors
- Increased revenue from existing donors
- Reduced IT expenditure due to cloud deployment
We've only had NXT for about 6 months, and so haven't seen huge shifts in any of these areas yet. The biggest hurdle has been getting our users to adopt the added functionality that has come with NXT and really take advantage of the opportunities the added functionality creates rather than just continuing to do what they've always done in RE 7. This is fundamentally a culture shift, and takes time.
Using BBMS as our payment processing system and Online Express to process online donations has provided some efficiencies to our organization. We already had the benefit of integration between Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge prior to upgrading to NXT, so haven't seen much change there.