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Why The Raiser's Edge Might be the Right Product for Your Organization!
Updated June 03, 2015

Why The Raiser's Edge Might be the Right Product for Your Organization!

Shawn Berry, MBA, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

7.93

Overall Satisfaction with The Raiser's Edge

We use The Raiser's Edge (RE) as a solution for our CRM as well as to process Gifts/Donations. We use it across multiple departments throughout the organizations. We have also integrated RE with NetCommunity and The Financial Edge to facilitate our Online Giving Platform. We are a bit unique in the sense that don't use RE to process Gifts to directly to our organization, however we use it to process Gifts made to other Churches. Our use of the product would be similar of a Community Foundation.
  • I believe that RE's queries are excellent. Your information if very to easy to access and recall. If the data exist in a field in RE then you are able to extract the data. Once you run query, you actually have the option to double click on a record from your results and drill down into the actually record!
  • RE has a tool that's called "Default Sets". This allows you to basically build templates for certain types of records. For example, if you have to input 20 fields to create a new constituent record and 10 of those fields are the same for everyone, you can create defaults to auto populate those fields.
  • RE's integration with NetCommunity really simplifies online donations. For instance, if you receive 100 donations through your website, rather than have to create 100 individual gift records, RE will enable you to the pull the 100 donations into a batch and process the gifts in minutes.
  • It would be nice to see RE put additional emphasis on Community Foundations. The software is written primary for an organization to manage and facilitate their direct contacts and gifts made to them, or said differently, a one-to-many relationship. We would like to see more options to facilitate a one-to-many-to-many relationships. For example, Community Foundation (one) supports numerous non-profit organizations (many) and the donors who contribute to those organizations (many), rather than the Community Foundation simply administering gifts made to itself.
  • We would like to see RE have the ability to "link" their Action Records (todo's) directly to Gifts or Funds rather than just constituents.
  • Fund Records are not as tightly linked to constituent records via queries as we would like to see them.
  • With The Raiser's Edge we have been able to significantly reduce (30% or more) our processing time for new gifts.
  • The integration with NetCommunity has allowed us to have a new presence for Online Giving. This has generated several thousand new donations for our organization.

Are you a Community Foundation? If so, you will likely need spend time tweaking the product to meet your needs.

If you are using the product to administer your contacts and gifts made directly to your organization, then I would I say you would will be well satisfied in The Raiser's Edge.

Using The Raiser's Edge

I believe that we would be very likely to renew our use of The Raiser's Edge. The software seems to meet our business needs. It's very flexible and easy to use. The abundance of resources that Blackbaud provides via their website make training a breeze. In conclusion, I believe it to be a great product!

The Raiser's Edge Implementation

We had good success with the our implementation of The Raiser's Edge. The user guides, online resources, and Blackbaud support were all very helpful.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled

Using The Raiser's Edge

The system was very well-designed. It is easy to use and most of the areas within the system are very intuitive. If you navigate the system and use the various record types the tabular interface makes it very simple.