The Raisers Edge as the core software in our integrated solution for fundraising and gift processing.
Updated January 16, 2020

The Raisers Edge as the core software in our integrated solution for fundraising and gift processing.

Lena Trubnikova | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with The Raisers Edge

RE is being used by the Fundraising department to keep records of all constituents, gifts and events, track relationships, volunteers. The fundraisers use the proposals to track major gift prospects. We record all donations in it, import donations from Luminate Online and other online platforms into Raisers Edge using either RE import tool, RELO plugin or other plugins. The programming department uses it to record constituents. Marketing uses it to pull queries to communicate with constituents.
  • Records various aspects of constituent involvement with the organization.
  • Keeps record of all gifts.
  • Data posting to Financial Edge (FE) is limited and complicated to understand (took us time to adjust). The posting report does not have enough info: Appeal, campaign and who posted to FE. In genereral, RE/FE integration is not explained by Blackbaud properly, we had to figure out everything on the go.
  • Volunteer module is a bit cumbersome; some fields have duplicate fields in the event module; the identical information ends up being recorded in two different places.
  • Our constituents are better organized.
  • The fundraising structure is more streamlined and logical.
We made a transition to Raisers Edge from Donor drive 6 years ago and considered a Salesforce solution at the time. We found RE to be the most suitable for our overall needs.
I find that support is readily available and overall knowledgeable. Because we deal with a lot of integrations, with LO, Net Community, and RE, I find that there are not a lot of support staff who know enough about the integration of products.

Do you think Raiser's Edge delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Raiser's Edge's feature set?

Yes

Did Raiser's Edge live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Raiser's Edge go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Raiser's Edge again?

Yes

I would recommend that people use The Raisers Edge (RE) as the main depository of information about the organization's constituent base, gifts, pulling queries. I find that the interface is becoming really dated and some features are not user-friendly for fundraisers, but I guess NXT is solving this issue.

Using The Raisers Edge

Fundraising team, event organizers
gift processing, data analysis, finance and accounting
marketing
2 - one person is processing gifts
one person is responsible for the overall database management
sometimes we get volunteers for simple data entry
  • constituent management
  • gift processing and prospecting
  • our integration with Financial Edge is specific to our organization use
  • not sure, we are using almost all the segments
  • possibly utilize actions more
We consider RE to be the best in class for constituent management and gift processing. Integration with FInancial Edge and other platforms also plays a huge role.

Evaluating The Raisers Edge and Competitors

Yes - Donor Drive
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
we needed a better way to segment our database and allow recording a more intricate fundraising structure. RE allowed us to do that as opposed to just event management in Donor Drive
we are constantly re-evaluating our options and still believe that RE is the best CRM for our needs.

The Raisers Edge Implementation

Training is key. Blackbaud offered the training package prior to implementation and it helped us understand how to build it so that the future use would be appropriate to the operation of the organization. Data conversion stage was also very important. A lot of work must be done before making the final decisions about the data conversion - what data to convert and what to leave out, where certain information was supposed to be placed within RE.
Yes - it was more than 6 years ago but i think it was creating the structure, data conversion, training, going live.
Change management was a major issue with the implementation - we ended up with a better fundraising structure, overall constituent management and better understanding of our base.
  • data conversion
  • integration of RE with FE - the biggest challenge

The Raisers Edge Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - sometimes the integration with LO and FE causes issues. Usually we get them resolved to our satisfaction
we recently had an issue with BBMS/LO. A donor approached us with request to refund 2 out of 3 credit card charges. we discovered that 2 of these donations had been entered in LO as offline unconfirmed gifts and then confirmed by using the same credit cart. It took a while to figure out how it happened. Blackbaud customer service found the reasons and explained everything to us within a week.

Using The Raisers Edge

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • gift processing
  • queries
  • Events Module and Volunteer module overlap and I was not sure which of them to use for recording volunteer participation
  • volunteer module is pretty cumbersome (while you can record a lot of information, it requires a lot of time and effort)
i think that this is the best CRM with the most functionality - it can capture a lot of info about the constituents, their donations and other ways they are connected to the organization.