Raise the bar with your fundraising!
November 15, 2016

Raise the bar with your fundraising!

Jenna Cronin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with The Raisers Edge

Raiser’s Edge is used by the advancement division at my organization, which includes the development, events, and membership departments. Raiser’s Edge is used to track and report on constituent giving whether it’s an outright donation, an event ticket, or a membership purchase. The software allows us to keep a detailed giving history on each constituent, track communications, pull segmented mailing lists, and store many other useful attributes about each individual constituent.
  • Raiser’s Edge has over 100 canned reports to assist with all aspects of reporting in the system. These reports are fairly customizable to your organizations individual needs and if there’s not a report that matches your needs you can write custom reports.
  • The export tool is very developed and robust for extracting information from the system. You can extract almost every field in the system, which is hundreds. One of the most useful tools in export is extracting giving history summaries, which are completely customizable.
  • The batch tool for entering constituents and/or gifts makes entering mass amounts of information quick and easy.
  • Database administrators have some really powerful tools such as Global Change and Imports to perform mass changes and cleanup in the system.
  • You can set security within the system by groups or by individual users. This is really helpful for organizations that have many users of all different abilities and roles.
  • The tables and fields within Raiser's Edge are extremely customizable to your organization's individual needs. This means that business decisions should be well thought out, written policies need to be in place, and you need to have a dedicated database administrator to keep your data clean and streamlined.
  • There is no batch functionality for memberships, which makes memberships quite labor intensive to enter in large quantities. Additionally, the membership tool is so advanced/customized that it doesn’t easily integrate with services like Import Omatic out of the box.
  • Raiser’s Edge as a whole is not very user friendly and requires training for users. The system will seem very intuitive to a data minded individual but not super functional for a front line fundraiser for example. The query, export, and reporting tools are difficult to use without training and interest in learning. Blackbaud is addressing this issue with the release of Raiser’s Edge NXT.
  • I'd like to see more user friendly guides and best practices guidelines within the system. It's often hard to locate the exact help topic you're looking for when in the online knowledge base. Although, support is very responsive if you can't help yourself!
  • Increased ability to segment direct mail pieces and report on specific appeal response.
  • Ability to provide detailed donor reporting to development staff on new, lapsed, and upgraded donors so they can focus their fundraising efforts.
  • Management of a large quantity of membership renewals.
Raiser's Edge is well suited for medium to large organizations that require a robust system for collecting data, running reports, and managing relationships with their constituents. The system does require upkeep, customizations, and constant managing so it's best suited for an organization that has the personnel resources to commit time to database management.