Raisers Edge - IF you are good to it, it will give you GOLD
November 02, 2016
Raisers Edge - IF you are good to it, it will give you GOLD
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with The Raisers Edge
Raisers Edge is being used by the development department to track donations and our constituents relationship to us as an organization. Our database is not large but the relationships are long and often complicated. A database like this allows us to see the constituent and all of the interactions we have had with them over the years. The Raisers Edge in combination with some of the add-ons like Online Express have been helpful for seamless tracking of newsletter readership and conversions from our website and online publications.
- Queries are what we use to create lists of constituents with particular behaviors or similarities that we can use for creating mailings, invitations or actions. An amazing tool with endless possibilities.
- Raisers Edge is a beast of a program. It can do just about anything you could want for a donor database and Blackbaud offers several supplemental solutions that seamlessly integrate.
- Donor stewardship, from first contact, to donation, to acknowledgement letter, is a process that is handled particularly well with Raisers Edge
- The program is quite complicated and if data is not entered correctly than the program just won't work well. "bad in, bad out'. But that is not unique to this program.
- That some of the features that I like to use like global changes for adding appeals is pretty buried and the way of finding it convoluted.
- Attributes could be more flexible: like I would prefer to have all events under one table (which it can do now) but then there is no step further where I can then say whether they RSVP and then also whether they attended and their name for easy export for nametags.
- Tracking all of this information allows us to behave in a much more professional manner. Repeat solicitations, not understanding donor relationships and so many other simple slip ups are totally avoided with a program like Raisers Edge. Invaluable!
- We are able to segment and evaluate what work and what does not. We are able to track our appeals, mailings and other correspondence to see what action brings the most in donations.