Good, bad, and ugly

Additional modules are not tied to additional Query types. This means if I pay extra so we can have unique records to track each major gift proposal, we can still only group by the people we are soliciting and then report on all of their proposals, rather than being able to target by type or date and so forth.

In places where they are lacking, people have created plug-ins. It would be nice if the function of these plug-ins was then incorporated into future upgrades, but they never are. It often seems as though once someone else solves a Raiser's Edge problem, the company deems the problem solved and pays no more attention to it.

The technical support staff are beginner to intermediate users and it shows. They lack experience using the software at an actual non-profit, they quote from the user guides and often, they are wrong about what the software cannot do. They often say the software can't do it, or they don't have a solution yet, but frequently they are underestimating the software, or don't know how to trick it.

The user guides and support are often experts in Raiser's Edge, but not in the other Blackbaud integrated software, so if you have issues with how one of their solutions (like NetCommunity) speaks/integrates to Raiser's Edge, you can speak to people who are experts in one or the other but not both. So neither are able to solve the problem because neither knows how the other piece works, yet they all work for the same company!

There are huge issues with gift reporting, and if you check out user forums you'll find that regardless of years of complaints, nothing has changed in the software architecture. Issue one is that there is no way to report on soft credits that come from a spouse gift as opposed to an corportate/foundation gift. Two is that there is no way good way to report on split gifts. You can get the data, sort of, and you can somersault in external reporting software like Crystal Reports, but at the end of the day it has never worked well. Three is that the built-in gift reports are extremely limited in the type of data they can display. Fourth is that the built-in analytical reports are limited in how they allow you to target data; for instance, there is a strong desire to be able to report on consistent giving rather than consecutive years giving - and here you encounter issues with the way soft credits are attributed, how the analysis makes no acceptions for one missed year out of 25 giving years, and so forth. Though these things can be built in custom reports, it'd be nice if more of the built-in reports met the needs of the average fundraising office.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Raiser's Edge stems from the customer expectation. It is the top of the line software in non-profits, it is very expensive yet widely used. It is very complex software, and every customer should have staff who are dedicated to managing the software, maintaining and cleaning the data. Three years after converting to RE, many clients find themselves scrambling to hire database managers or outside consultants to clean up the disasterous mess of data scattered, hidden, throughout the database. This seems like a very common occurrence, especially in mid-size to small organizations.