Review of Raiser's Edge by an Advancement and Fundraising professional who has used Raiser's Edge at 3 jobs and Senior Systems at 1 job
July 09, 2014

Review of Raiser's Edge by an Advancement and Fundraising professional who has used Raiser's Edge at 3 jobs and Senior Systems at 1 job

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with The Raiser's Edge

We use Raiser's Edge to manage constituents, process and track gifts to the school, use actions and the Proposals tool to process moves management and track where a donor is in the process of making a gift (qualification, solicitation, stewardship, etc.). We use it to pull queries, exports and reports used for mailing lists, event/invitation lists, financial reports, financial reconciliation reports with our school's Business Office, Attributes to track various activities and positions held by constituents, constituency codes to manage our people (students, alumni, current parents, alumni parents, Board of Trustees, etc.).
  • Reports based on Constituency Codes
  • Gift entry
  • Profiles
  • Annual rollover of school constituents. Each year, seniors become alumni, senior parents with no younger children at the school become alumni parents, same with grandparents. Withdrawing of students and former faculty/staff. This process is tedious and time consuming and does not integrate easily with Education Edge. Seniors Systems does a better job. Education Edge, Raiser's Edge and Financial Edge should integrate better, and there should be a simplified summer rollover process for schools. Schools are a different ball-game than non-profit agencies due to annual rollover. Queries, imports, etc. can take WEEKS to get everything accomplished for summer rollover at a school. Could and should be simplified across the board for schools.
  • Queries and reports are not easy to pull if you want to use criteria outside of constituency codes, such as attributes, total cumulative giving, giving to just certain campaigns or funds, etc.
  • In general, I think there are several more standard reports that should be put in the Reports Tab. Such as a Pledges Due with installment report. This can be queried, but can't be shown in the standard Pledge Reports.
  • In general, this works well for a non-profit agency, but needs some major improvements to be used at K-12 or K-8 schools. Senior Systems definitely has an advantage because it was specifically designed for schools.
  • It would be impossible to do development at a non-profit or a school (I've used Raiser's Edge at both) without Raiser's Edge or a similar product.
  • I think RE is great for what it does, but could follow some Senior Systems leads on how to improve it for use at a school.
I think Senior Systems is better for use at a school. Raiser's Edge is better for a non-profit agency.
I have covered most of this already.
It could definitely take some cues from Senior Systems to be more functional and easy to use for K-8 or K-12 schools. Each year, schools have to transitions their constituents into new roles, as those things change year to year for a school (seniors become alumni, senior parents with no younger kids at the school become Alumni Parents, same with Grandparents to Former Grandparents, we have to import new student and new faculty/staff information from Education Edge, etc.). The syncing with Education Edge is not good, and there could be a much easier annual rollover process for updating Constituency Codes with to/from dates, Education records, etc. It is a very manual process right now.