Consider Staff Time in your Investment in Raiser's Edge
March 07, 2016

Consider Staff Time in your Investment in Raiser's Edge

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

Overall Satisfaction with The Raisers Edge

Our Resource Development team uses Raiser's Edge to track donor relationships, interactions with our constituents, as well as track and analyze our donations. We have both Raiser's Edge 7 and NXT and actively use both depending on job function. Our Annual Giving Officer and Grant Writers love NXT, while the rest of the team uses 7. As they roll out more roles, we hope to shift towards NXT.
  • Robust! It covers many areas of fundraising all in one place
  • Well known. It seems like most organizations are using Raiser's Edge, so there are plenty of support opportunities both with Blackbaud and outside of Blackbaud and many active communities of users to talk to.
  • Flexible. There's no 'one right way' to do things. Most of the modules are flexible enough to approach most problems organizations are looking for solutions for.
  • Flexible. While Raiser's Edge can do MANY things, it's hard to make those decisions unless you have a dedicated staff member who is fully trained in using the program.
  • Clunky. It tries to do SO MUCH that it ends up doing a few things REALLY WELL, and the rest end up mostly okay. Usually.
  • Importing. This is just one example of something that is not intuitive and ends up making a lot of manual data entry work. There is an import function, but it's difficult to use and requires many trainings to figure out all of the import keys necessary.
  • We bought the training package and it saves us thousands each year! We send all of our development team to multiple trainings every year. Downside is to use RE you do need many trainings.
  • With Raiser's Edge we're able to see some growth, but NXT will make that all really clear. I'm excited to see the direction Raiser's Edge is going in.
  • The manual work necessary is sometimes slow and tiresome. There are some aspects that aren't worth the staff time necessary to do it 'right.'
I was not a part of the decision to go with Raiser's Edge at either of the organizations I've worked with. However, I'd recommend looking into Little Green Light, Bloomerang, and Salesforce in addition to Raiser's Edge. I know many organizations that are happy with those programs - there's no right answer, just what's best for your organization.
If you're in a small organization, recognize that Raiser's Edge take a LOT to maintain - but it does grow well. So if you see growth on your horizon, it might be worth the investment. Make sure to spend a lot of time thinking through conversion to make sure you're well set up to succeed over time. Create a policy and procedure manual. Follow it. Data consistency is SO important.