Blackbaud is the gold standard

Overall, Blackbaud CRM is the gold standard for non profit fundraising software. It is expensive, but if your organization is large enough to afford it AND if you take the time and resources to train your employees to get the most out of it, you will gain tremendous insight into your donors and constituents.

Pros

We used this software at a previous organization that I worked at. Blackbaud has an incredible amount of reporting functionality. You can manipulate data any way you can imagine. Now that I have worked with other donor databases, I've come to appreciate in an even deeper way how much functionality Blackbaud's programs have.

Cons

It takes a fair amount of experience and training to get the most out of the software, just because it can do SO much! It is fairly user friendly for the basics, but when you are doing advanced query building and importing large amounts of data, you are going to need some technical assistance. But, they are pretty good about providing it.

Blackbaud is a great quality, scalable solutions

Pros

What I like most about Blackbaud is its built specifically for capturing and tracking data for non for profit agencies and allows you to see all of your data is a very secure envrionment

Cons

I did not like the level of customer level support that was provided when requiring answers to technical questions, and the timliness of response was not always the grestest.

Lackluster Customer Service, Limited Flexibility, and Expensive

To start, Blackbaud has terrible customer service. My organization has been with Blackbaud over two decades and when interacting with our Blackbaud financial representative I was not informed of this information. Blackbaud would require my organization lock into 3-year contracts at a time. Furthermore, my organization paid extra for this product called "Address Finder NXT" which is suppose to update the donor list for deceased donors. However, when performing my own experiment this product was not accurate. My organization did not renew a contract so Blackbuad auto-renewed my organization for another 3 years without our permission. As the new development coordinator I ended our 23-year relationship with Blackbaud for a more affordable customer-friendly Donor software company. For small non-profits I would not recommend Blackbaud. I would never recommend Blackbaud CRM to any organization.

Pros

The software is extremely detailed and if the user is trained it takes much less manual implementation than other less expensive competitors. This software is offered on the desktop as well as a cloud-based version. There are many additional products offered with the CRM to offer a whole encompassing experience with little manual effort.

Cons

Complex and not user friendly, difficult to teach new users, and for small non-profits too many options.

Very Robust CRM

One thing that stood out is that the UI is near intuitive, nice to look at and the data is well supported by a dedicated team at Blackbaud. I was able to pull reports on data quickly and easily for other users. Training is pretty seamless as far as getting users acclimated into the system. Though we didn't like the out-of-the-box functionalities, we understood that we wanted some customization, which was a bit pricey for our company. Once when we did get the essential functionalities edited, we were quite happy with the results. Customer support is great at quickly responding in helping us with issues.

Pros

Easy flow in adding donors, easy flow in taking donations, pretty UI, intuitive use and workflow. Reporting functions are easy to edit and create.

Cons

Licensing and customization can be pricey. If you have your own developer to improve functionality, you may not get access to test environments or else you're paying for their developer for customizations.

Great way to raise funds!

We are tracking our constituents and raising money by building relationships. We could not do that without this system.

Pros

This software is designed for nonprofits and the the features are incredibly helpful in maintaining and recording information about our constituents.

Cons

Some of Blackbaud's systems look dated and you have to upgrade (more $) for a 2018 look. However, the functionality is efficient and effective. The cost is also a bit high as compared to other cloud-based CRMs.