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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Generally good, but it takes some time to get used to the platform and its quirks and inefficiencies

Tons of features and pretty good at being customizable, generally intuitive point-and-click

It is not very efficient in terms of how many clicks it takes to do certain tasks, and it could be updated to not feel like something from 1998

Blackbaud CRM has given us a baseline for what to look for in a software. It has a lot of features and functionality that can be adapted for an organization.

Blackbaud CRM is a robust system. Constituent profiles allow for you to collect a wealth of information about your constituents and use it to analyze, communicate, and solicit donations or sell your products. You can not only collect biographical information, you can also upload media, create action tracks (work flows), record giving history, etc. You can also add custom attributes for anything that is not out of the box. There is a lot of support available for blackbaud products and a knowledgeable support team dedicated to answering questions and troubleshooting.

Software is a little clunky at times, you have to use it as it was intended or create workarounds to make things work. Software is pricey for a non-profit. Learning curve can be high for new users. When it comes to Membership, which is a big part of our business, the functionality is basic.

This has been a great tool for tracking grants for us. Before we just tracked this information in a multi-tab excel workbook. Taking advantage of this part of Blackbaud has had a huge benefit to us. All of our fundraising and grant data is in one place instead of stored in multiple locations we have a more thorough picture of our fundraising goals and performance.

Blackbaud CRM is has a lot of useful tools for fundraising, donor management, and grant writing. We have used this product for several years and it has been great tool for our company for the past 2. We learned after the first year if we didn't really learn the product and spend time watching the online and tutorials from the company then this product was not worth the money. The tutorials and modules are very helpful for making the most of the product. The price is worth it if you commit to learning and using tit to it's full capacity. The customer service is always great and reps are very helpful.

You have to put time in on the front end to learn the product or you will most not take advantage of all the software has to offer. It is not hard to use once you learn but the software is not the most intuitive so you have to learn as opposed to just jumping it in and things being easy to figure out naturally.

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.

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

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.

This software fits our needs entirely and is the industry leader for a reason. It's highly complex and is able to process information very quickly, however it can be difficult to learn without proper training.

It's a complex piece of software that can run very difficult algorithms and can execute a wide variety of functions. It's incredibly helpful that it comes in different formats as well to suit folks from both the front and back office and support them and their specific roles.

The software requires a significant amount of training to understand fully, and is quite complicated to approach as a beginner. The company does offer training sessions, but they can be quite costly.

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

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

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.

Overall it was good when we were smaller, but not ideal for a growing company.

I liked that this software was able to house all our donor information. Its fairly easy to run reports and the chat help feature was really good.

You can't tag or mark donations with more than two qualifications. Its also frustrating that you couldn't edit PDFs once they were downloaded because of Canadian guidelines even though I was based out of the US.

I'm a customer of another company called Russian School of Math (RSM). They use Blackbaud as their payment provider. It's a nightmare for me whenever I need to pay RSM

1. When I register a new class I get a new “family” id. What??? I’m not buying a new class not a family! 1. Can you fix your terminology? This is extremely confusing 2. I've to go to one website for registration (parents.russianschool.com) and another website (parent.blackbaud.com) for payment. Third one parent.smarttution.com not sure what it is 3. Even within the payment website, there are multiple school accounts? I expect one login for the company not one for each of its branch. 4. What is Blackbaud and why should I deal/learn about that when I’m doing business with RSM? Can you hide your implementation details from users 5. Blackbaud's password policy is too strong

The sales team did a great presentation but after implementation support and customer service is awful.

Customer service and support teams are horrible, training is complex for a non-profit with volunteers and keeping data current and relevant is time-consuming and archaic.

It is so frustrating. Customer service is an absolute joke

It is online and you can attach backup. I like that you can upload a budget.

The customer support is pitiful and there is no one to holistically assist when you have a problem. Don't buy the line you can call one company for all your needs because it works like 20 companies all pointing their finger at each other and it is impossible to resolve problems. I am highly disatisfied.

Blackbaud has allowed our team to increase relationship with our patrons through the careful documentation of every interaction and helpful information regarding the constituent- including sales orders, event registrations, donations, prospect management, memberships, contact information, household/organization relationships, marketing communications, etc. We also utilize the training and support available through Blackbaud to ensure we are using their tools to their full potential.

I love that Blackbaud has many different software options. The non-profit I work for used Blackbaud's Raisers Edge software for many years and switched to Altru in 2012 as our CRM needs had increased/developed as our organization grew. I also am appreciative of the time and attention that Blackbaud employees provide when support or training is needed.

Blackbaud's client base is largely owned by non-profit organizations. Non-profits aren't typically the kind that can spend thousands of dollars on software every month. However, Blackbaud's products are very costly. I would say they are worth the money, if it's affordable. But I do question their motives when it comes to cost, as they seem very high for who the products are for.

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.

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.

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

I just tried to log in to our personalized blackbaud portal and it's as if it's making repeat requests to the server on a loop. My colleague has spent over 15 hours (that i know of) simply customizing a grading form. I work for another school as well and we use a completely different SIS tool called Alma and it is a dream. And I can get on a chat service and I always immediately get support from great people who are super helpful and kind and I feel like I know them because it's the same folks every time and they point me to support articles.

It's cool you can customize this tool to work for your organization.

Support has been pretty bad. We have access to a person for a set number of hours, which hasn't been very great (not very personable, quickly trying to get through training sessions, will say he will do something and doesn't). But when I ask for access (that's right, you need special access to their knowledge base) our real person helper did not ensure at all that I could gain access to support pages (telling me to just e-mail this whole other team and they would help me).

Awful.

When the eTapestry product was first purchased it seemed overly complex, but it did function properly. Queries were not intuitive, but we learned. Our database size was approximately 11,000 records.

Two things: As Blackbaud made "enhancements" to the product, they did not provide ways to migrate from the old format to the new. In our case they said that we needed to individually edit our, now, 12,000 records. This was not an option and we decided to leave. Leading to the second problem. I sent Blackbaud notice that I was leaving. The notice was completely ignored and I was send a "discounted" contract. A Blackbaud representative asked me to call at a certain time, which I did. There was no answer and I left voice mail. I sent another notice that I was leaving. I was sent another discounted contract. I have now been sent bills for the original contract, AND for accrued time, in spite of the fact that Blackbaud has acknowledged receiving the [second] notice that I was leaving.

100% dissatisfied customer. Will never use them again. Much better options with vendors who are invested in your organization's success.

Strong functionality and good training and tutorial resources. That's about it for the positive.

Customer support is nonexistent. Company has grown so big the could care less about clients and use deceitful renewal techniques. I couldn't even get them to call me back for us to upgrade our subscription substantially. Much better options out there. Steer clear of these folks.....the could care less about your organization and care only about their profits.

Their service and support is awful. They make mistakes in invoicing and don't even try to fix them--corrections take months, and they'll turn off YOUR service/support for their mistakes. If an account rep leaves, they won't tell you, they'll just let your calls sit in his box. If we were making this decision today, and I know what I know now, there is no way I would consider Blackbaud.

It does what we need it to do, helps us keep track of our donors

Working with Blackbaud is a very unpleasant experience. Trying to get answers to anything is impossible. Their contract has fine print in it that seems designed to cause you problems--do be sure to read the fine print.

The ease of use and navigation, payment processor built in, the customization of donation forms, and having multiples, reporting, and the amount of plugins available.

Communication with other software such as Constant Contact.

Blackbaud CRM has been a less than helpful product and I would not choose this again.

There is not much I liked about the software. This does have the ability to store a lot of info and is data beast. They are slowly getting caught up when it comes to usability and features.

Honestly, its hard to know where to begin. I really dislike most everything about Blackbaud and its services. It always seems 2 steps behind the competitors. Steady support is hard to find. We either had to pay high prices for dedicated support or the turnover rate led to going through multiple reps. The price for any of their product suites are way above the rest for way less functionality. This lacks integration with other marketing platforms. Once you are locked in, you are very locked it. Do not assume you will be able to migrate of their products.

It's versatility in being able to manage your donor's information. It is flexible enough that it allows users to define how and what they input. There is a lot of functionality in being able to track your interactions with your donors.

It is a bit complex and there is a steep learning curve. If your org doesn't have the proper roadmap in place first, you can get bogged down with learning the program also whilst trying to stay afloat.

We did all our daily data entry and reports

RaiserEdge was our main CRM before we switched to Salesforce, RaiseEdge really built something that enabled nonprofits to have everything covered.

RaisersEdge stopped keeping up with times, they did not invest on the online platform and the bridge and net community were a disaster. I loved RaisersEdge but they simple stopped investing our their technology and they become a very closed software.

Blackbaud CRM is a clunky program. The queries are a very frustrating part of this program. Also the customer service on this specific product is really lacking.

The linking options for couples, and linking for parents to children was very impressive. It was fairly simple to add constituents.

Importing accurately was a struggle I think mostly because you only had a certain amount of fields to use. Also pulling "Queries" or reports, was frightening. I needed classes to just understand how to pull accurately. We are using a new CRM software that imports very accurately and quickly. The reporting is much easier and more comprehensive and I love the new feature of adding a new field to any section of the software any time you want. This makes reporting and collecting information so much more simple!

Horrible

Small amount of individuals on their tech support staff are helpful.

Every aspect is a nightmare. Each billing cycle there is ALWAYS more added to the bill than originally quoted. One month 200 sustainers were deleted and they never helped to recapture those members. They want to charge $13,000 to make simple change to a donation page. (Our new membership system gave us a new donation page at no extra cost.)