Raiser's Edge - A Sophisticated Donor Relationship Management Software
September 28, 2016
Raiser's Edge - A Sophisticated Donor Relationship Management Software
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with The Raisers Edge
We use Raiser's Edge (RE) to better enable us to build a relationship with our donors at all levels, but especially the relationship with our major donors. Raiser's Edge enables us to track the donor throughout their donor lifecycle, to monitor progress through the Moves Management process. The advent of Raiser's Edge NXT has even provided our major gift officers with proactive suggestions of donors who may need more attention or who may be in danger of lapsing. We also use Raiser's Edge's Events Module to manage a wide range of events from small house parties of less than 50 guests to large dinner/luncheon events of 250+ attendees. Finally, our data in Raiser's Edge has been deemed so accurate that our RE database is used as a sub-ledger of our finance department's general ledger - which means that we are no longer have staff in two departments enter the same individual gift data into two different software systems.
- Raiser's Edge provides opportunity to not only track a lot of information about an individual donors, but also allows us to "connect the dots" by helping us to track the relationships between our donors - donors who have connections to foundations that may increase our chances of getting a grant funded, donors who have connections to significant major donors who can help us to increase their friend's relationship with our organization, donors who have significant political connections who can help us to make sure that our issues are heard by our representatives.
- Raiser's Edge provides many modules - events, volunteers, planned giving, that help to manage, track, and report on those activities.
- Raiser's Edge is constantly making improvements in the software. Much of it based on customer feedback.
- Raiser's Edge can be a little overwhelming for some users who are not as comfortable with computers and software. Building queries and exports can be particularly intimidating to some. A skilled and knowledgeable database support infrastructure is really a must have - even if this is one person who really knows the software inside and out in small shops.
- It would be great if Raiser's Edge could increase the pace at which new improvements are made to Raiser's Edge 7 in much the same way that new functionality is rolled out frequently for Raiser's Edge NXT.
- Raiser's Edge could use some streamlining of screens/tabs for data entry to make routine tasks more efficient.
- Raiser's Edge has greatly enhanced our ability to focus more on our Major Donors Relationships and to improve our ability to engage these donors in our mission more fully.
- Raiser's Edge has increased the efficiency of producing and analysing our data - our prior software was much more unwieldy and creating and running reports often took 2-3 times more man hours that the same reports in RE.
- Raiser's Edge has helped us to more effectively manage our events and helped to more accurately assess our ROI to determine which events are worth the required effort and which events need re-vamping or should be discontinued.
Raiser's Edge is far superior to eTapestry in terms of queries, reporting, depth of data, analytics, and ease of use. eTapestry is a great product for small shops but our organization simply out grew it as our need to enhance our fundraising efforts, increase the channels through which we fundraise, and our our need for increased major donor support became a reality for us.