I love the Raiser's Edge!
May 12, 2016

I love the Raiser's Edge!

Anna Warner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Raiser's Edge

We use Raiser's Edge in most of the administrative departments of our organization. It is the most valuable resource that our organization has. It houses all of the contact information and giving history for each person that interacts with our organization whether they are donors, event participants, employees, program participants or friends of the organization. It enables good communication about these individuals and how we can steward them well.

Pros

  • The Raisers Edge (RE) gives many different ways to view an individual's interactions with our organization.
  • RE is flexible in how you can record data to best meet your organization's needs.
  • RE provides many resources for learning more about the product, how to use it and best practices in the database, as well as in fundraising in general.

Cons

  • For those that aren't involved with data input, there is a difficult learning curve for how data can be pulled out to be usable for them.
  • RE is expensive!!! Many features are only available when you pay more, and being a smaller organization, that isn't something we have the resources to spend on those modules.
  • Support isn't always the most responsive. I have had an email into my rep with some questions for a couple of weeks with no response.
  • We are able to look at our donor database both broadly and narrowly as we have need to predict trends in giving and affinity.
  • Our giving in the past ten years has grown exponentially due to data analysis.
I think it is actually very well suited for organizations that are multi-faced with events, prospect research and action recording happening on a regular basis. At a previous organization, we used the membership module. This is a bit of stretch for RE. It is not super user friendly when it comes to merging or recreating histories when something goes wrong. I don't think it is a great option for recording membership interactions that are scanned on a bar code. The volunteer module also leaves a lot to be desired.

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