For nonprofit higher Ed which fund raise.
Updated June 16, 2017

For nonprofit higher Ed which fund raise.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Raiser's Edge NXT

Raiser's Edge NXT is being utilized by our organization to facilitate communication as well as to capture more of what is happening on the ground. The cloud access which is mobile responsive has made it much easier for our employees on the road to input data as well as communication back to our home office. One example is using the actions to input something as simple as an updated phone number for a donor and assigning it to one of our operations people. This cuts down on a non-standardized way of requests, cuts down on the same thing being entered more than once, cuts down on time being wasted, and the error rate. The list goes on: merge requests, expect a check, follow up on a pledge, look at an attachment. You can edit the list any way you would like. Being able to work in the work center section is very helpful. This organizes a number of things for you. You can use the tags (currently use industry standards) but they are in the process of making that editable as well. Being able to access donor info and by clicking/touching the phone or address it will populate the action of calling, or emailing, or open up the maps view. You could also analyze performance which is also great.
  • Organizing your priorities through using the work center, tags, and actions.
  • The Work center is where you see actions you have assigned to yourself or others, or others have assigned to you. This helps keep people more productive and take a lot out of the email and puts it front and center.
  • Tags and actions are very specific. Tags are used to categorize you pipline of work. Such a lapsing donor, or someone has has lapsed. Rather then reports, this again keeps a steady amount of work ready to be taken care of. People are more dependent on the system and not other people to assign them work or reports.
  • The database view (classic Raiser's Edge, RE7) is still necessary for much of the in-depth queries. NXT's version of SKY reporting is being updated every week, and every month or so, I would consider the updates include beneficial new features. I think it will be a long time before RE7 is shut down.
  • We knew going into the upgrade that the entire system was going to be in phases. So the first phase is directly targeted at improving the fundraisers' experience. the rest of the system needs work and that will take sometime. It really depends on how your organization utilizes the system currently. For some this will not be an issue, for others could be considered and issue.
  • They have changed some titles. For example, in RE 7: Solicitor, proposal, and action have been changed to fundraiser, opportunity, and interaction in NXT. I had to do a lot of digging to find that out. They could be more proactive in communicating these definitions to organizations.
  • Operational Efficiency
  • Increased revenue from new donors
  • Increased revenue from existing donors
  • Increased scalability due to cloud deployment
The biggest achievement thus far is operational efficiency. We have been able to decrease processing time, duplicate processes, errors, reporting time and internal requests.
increased revenue from both new and existing donors through the friendly UI which helped show some donors we would have missed with our traditional way of keeping track of everyone.
We have and still benefit from the solutions. We currently use RE NXT, online express, Blackbaud merchant services, the event application(on iPad), and the payment dongles with our (mobile pay application on the iPad) to take donations. We also recently began using the company gift matching option as well as the analytics products. We have few complaints. It is a robust system which provides us with almost all we need.
We have evaluated both a small and a large alternative. None of them offered as much as NXT did for our needs.
It is well suited in organizing work flows as well as facilitating better communications.
It is less appropriate if you rely heavily on complicated queries for all fo your decisions.

Raiser's Edge NXT Support

They provide how to guides, knowledge base, email chat and phone support.

Raiser's Edge NXT Reliability

The user interface is amazing. All of our major gift officers have a short cut on there mobile phone and use it. RENXT being easy to access, view and, update has made the user adoption rate much better then the old database view. Specifically for fundraisers. Reports also load quickly. I do not know about its performance with other software expecept for outlook (you could add an action/reminder with in RENXT and have it also added to your calendar. That's works great.