Glossy veneer on an overage frankenstein whose glory days long gone
February 09, 2018
Glossy veneer on an overage frankenstein whose glory days long gone
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Raiser's Edge NXT
Raiser's Edge NXT (and its one step below predecessor Raiser's Edge) is our nonprofit fundraising CRM with add-on modules of online giving pages, merchant services, email, event management software and an advocacy module that is supposed to communicate with the CRM. Exports are used to supply lists for mailings for our newsletters and financial exports provide our finance office with philanthropic gift information. The software is cloud-based and used by 5 individuals - from our events manager to our major gift officer to our gift acknowledgment coordinator.
- Imports/Exports and Queries
- Customized reports for analytic review
- Gift management and tracking
- I've used Raiser's Edge for the past 20 years, and used to love it. But all good things come to pass. This thing is living on its reputation and is way overpriced.
- Here is where RE has gone wrong: they offer add-ons that don't work well with the base model of RE and the sales people and customer service people will not admit that they weren't programmed to go along with it and thus don't work well. It's obviously clunky programming! The event module and online gift forms are primitive, and the stand-alone advocacy software that I pay an EXTRA yearly $5,000 for can't even communicate properly with Raiser's Edge!
- Here's one of the most troubling concerns lately: the online giving servers from RE crashed numerous times during the last week of December 2017 (prime donation season! I had donors making $2,000 and $5,000 gifts as well as the countless $35 donors calling me asking what was going on)...
- I'm also worried about the privacy of my data. The offer a wealth screening service and the fine print as to what is my data and what they use is very sketchy... I have concerns here that their customer service representatives were never able to satisfactorily answer. Eventually, I threw in the towel on that battle.
- The customer support, while extremely pleasant, never seems to supply clear answers or solve problems. In the past decade, it seems like I've been yes'ed to death. Either I'm asking tougher questions as I get older, or they are just trained to be cagier when they don't know an answer. Again, they wear me down and I typically drop it.
- When I graduated from college in 1992, I was told "You have to learn WordPerfect - it's the industry standard". Well, its time faded quickly after that. Lately, I've been wondering, is Raiser's Edge the next WordPerfect?
- Operational Efficiency
- Increased revenue from new donors
- Increased revenue from existing donors
- Reduced IT expenditure due to cloud deployment
- Increased scalability due to cloud deployment
I feel that I've been hanging onto an old product - like a haircut that should have been changed out long ago! I really feel that once our contract finally ends (will it ever?) we can finally gain access to the tools we need - and not have to still rely on clunky, inflexible systems - that are unreliable at the most critical of times!
We also have Luminate Advocacy. I'm not pleased with that product either, or the Blackbaud customer service.