Great product, but the lack of customer service for the price point leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

This is definitely a nice product that does everything that it promises, and helps us keep track of all of our donors.

The price point is high for what you are getting, and customer support for this product is extremely poor at best.

I think the RE NXT interface is incredibly intuitive. It helps new team members get on the ground faster with learning how to search records and find the information that they need. That said, a strong background in the database view is helpful to any member of your team, whether they are on the road or not. I would strongly suggest having teams trained formally on both systems.

What I love about RE NXT is that it helps to visualize graphs, such as donor patterns and key financial data, automatically. You no longer have to have endless queries and exports and dashboards to access the data you want the most. This helps facilitate staff meeting discussions, and also keeps all team members informed on the fly. Secondly, the prospect profiles for managers. Gone are the days of exporting travel profiles in plain text. Now a PM can login from the road to see all the details they need in a useful manner -- and what's even better? They can change how the data is displayed so that it is personalized to them. It is clean, well constructed, and yet also flexible enough to be able to dig deeper with a couple of clicks. And if they need to find a new person to visit in their area, the map tools are perfect. Highly recommended for offices with lots of traveling teammates.

As with both versions of RE, you only get out what you put into it. You need to make sure you have the right policies and procedures in place, for example, to make sure that certain fields in actions are required. You'll also need to work with your team to make sure they understand the updated language from the database view to the NXT view. For example, proposals and opportunities are the same thing. This is a bit of a challenge in offices where the NXT vs. database team may not interact that much and will be speaking slightly different languages about this software. It is not a deal-breaker, just a trainable moment.

With the NXT version of its products, along with Blackbaud pretty much forcing its customers onto the cloud, Blackbaud is making some big mistakes. They haven't thought the web products out too much before pushing them out, for one (lots of functionality that previously existed doesn't exist now, although promised), and their customer service is no longer something to rave about. Anyone interested in RE-NXT but who hasn't used the older version of the product at all is going to be more impressed by (for example) Avectra's NetForum, which is cheaper and isn't waiting for significant functionality to be rolled out.

It's good Blackbaud realized that it needed to build in the classic version ("database view") of the old Raisers Edge into its NXT cloud version of the product. The old RE remains one of the best donor-, events-, membership-management software packages around. I've been using since 1997, and Raisers Edge integrates perfectly with Financial Edge.

As I mentioned, the cloud version of the software ("web view," or what you land on as soon as you click into Blackbaud.com and sign on) is weak. Adding to the frustration is that it looks completely different from the old version of the software. The worst thing about the cloud version is that a lot of the functionality in the old version has yet to show up in the web version, although Blackbaud keeps promising that future updates will contain familiar functions. In the middle of all this frustration is that Blackbaud's customer service, once the gold standard for what any customer service should be when paying this much for a product, has changed dramatically to customer service sometimes helping directly as they always did in the past, to customer service sending you Knowledgebase links for you, the customer, to figure out things yourself.

I'm speaking to RE7, i.e. the database view specifically, which many nonprofits use exclusively but those who purchase the NXT bundle also have access to the full database view as well. I've been using RE7 for 12 years and overall I love it, especially in combination with the NXT web view.

There is so much you can do with Raiser's Edge, it's a robust and powerful tool. It works "out of the box" without need for programming or customization per se (other than settings and configuration etc.) so you don't need to be a coder to set up and use. I particularly love queries to pull together lists of donors who meet certain criteria, which can then be used for mailing lists, reports, exports, etc. The acknowledgement letters are incredibly valuable, allowing variable data and personalized language, e.g. when a gift is designated to a particular program we pull in a paragraph about that program without our gift entry staff having to do any manual or extra work.

Can be a bit clunky, and not always intuitive (NXT web view is a huge improvement in those areas). The reports aren't pretty (again NXT is astronomically better there) and sometimes there isn't a report that will work for our needs so I have to set up with queries and exports. There is almost always a way to do what I need to do, but I sometimes have to go through some complicated digital acrobatics to get there.

It's doubtful to me, especially after having worked with a few smaller nonprofits which have used Raisers Edge, that even the heaviest users in this arena are using even 50% of the product's out of the box functionality. So while I love the product, and especially love it because it integrates seamlessly with Financial Edge for the accounting reporting, smaller nonprofits are probably better served with something just as user-friendly but much cheaper for donations/events/membership management, like Avectra's Net Forum.

Blackbaud's Raisers Edge is great software for donations management, including special events and memberships. It's very easy to use, and very easy to get information from, whether through any of the many canned reports, or through queries and exports. Support is extra, but well worth the cost, at least in the initial years after set-up.

The cost - upwards for just the donations management - is considerable. And things like the Special Events module and Membership and Tributes and Memorials modules are not included in the base package. Like most other software, a lot of thought needs to happen when setting Raisers Edge up. But seriously for every con that I could list, the customer support that comes extra with the annual maintenance, if purchases, offsets the con with quick answers and fixes, so that even the most complicated thing in RE is easily addressed with a quick phone call to support.

RE has a lot of capabilities that are not user-friendly with little-to-no support from them, and very aggressive sales endeavors. Essentially, we did not have good experience with them at all and glad we switched to a service that is user-friendly and very responsive. We were very surprised by their strong-arm tactics to re-subscribe, although they were unsuccessful, thanks to the Better Business Bureau, at which time RE could not produce any contract to which they had claimed we were bound.

A lot of functionality for large nonprofits, yet with little to no customer support.

Very aggressive sales endeavors and dare I say devious re-subscription processes. They tried to re-subscribe us at a very high price quoting a timeline when we could decide to not re-subscribe. We tried to unsubscribe, but they said we were bound by a contract. We had been using RE for more than a decade, with no consideration. They insisted we missed the timeline to unsubscribe and demanded a very expensive fee for the following period. Ultimately, we reported them to the Better Business Bureau and they could not produce a signed contract from our agency, or even a template from them. We had a back-and-forth with RE via the BBB, at which time they stopped contacting us realizing they had no basis for their demands.

although it has improved things, our office has old practices that prohibit the use of NXT full potential. for the price, i think there should be regular one on one sessions and training, not just readings and webinars. blackbaud is always trying to sell things to make the use of their products more efficient but we already spend a lot of money

ease of use on the road. organized into easy to see tiles. ability to upload things by dragging. ability to get lists easily

inability to create most custom lists. would like lists to be provided by fund. would like all contact information to be able to be shown for donors in one line with name, ID, phone, email and exclusions. need to make very complex queries to accomplish and extract data from the database view. not user friendly for regular office employee. expensive program that our office does not even know how to fully use. would like more individualized training and support to learn all the aspects of what we pay for. however we have a database manager that does this but acts as a gatekeeper.

Raiser's Edge NXT has notified us when prospect donor pledges are ending and recommendations for cultivation which has increased our major giving donors.

The Raiser's Edge database was very outdated however with the addition of NXT it's now very visually appealing and user-friendly. They took the old database look and revamped it to include charts, recommendations for donor cultivation and alerts daily referencing which donors to reach out to. It's very mobile friendly and great for major giving officers so they could make notes and assign tasks to their team while on the road. You could easily look up donor records and it's all accessible from Blackbaud.com so you don't need to download an app. It's good to have when on meetings and if you have to be an exhibitor for your Foundation and quickly look up donor records.

NXT shows consecutive donor years at the top of each profile however the years are not always accurate with the years in Raiser's database. Sometimes the years are way off. Also, they should make it easier to view outstanding pledges in NXT. NXT is a bit pricey however worth the cost and your return on investment is improved as it notifies you when you have major giving prospects to reach out to.

Raiser's Edge NXT has so much potential and is a worthwhile product as long as you have a team that's comfortable using both web and database view. As a non-profit CRM, it's still hard to beat - especially for organizations with a large donor base and fundraising capacity.

I love the user interface and the ability to "drag and drop" objects within constituent records to customize how I want to see information. The dashboard design is lovely and, after a bit of a learning curve, can be used to display some really helpful information for fundraisers.

This is not yet a completed product and shouldn't be used without the RE 7 database view. RE NXT has all the basic functionality needed for fundraisers to use exclusively, but not database admin staff. A lot of gift processing functionality, and even reporting fields, have not been moved over from RE 7. For any detailed reporting using OR or NOT, custom attributes, or gift amounts requires one to go back into database view to use queries/exports/canned reports.

Database for all donations - information is kept reliable, complete (can be used to store a lot of data/facts) and accessible for reports

Data entry is easy and reports are dependable. Versatility in the type of information that can be stored in each constituent record.

the software programmers I know say the set up is very 'old school.' I use batches a lot in RE - and the setting up of each is not as intuitive as some software programs out there.

I previously worked with many other database interface software in the for-profit world, where I worked for the first 15+ years of my career. So when I started using Raiser's Edge, it came relatively easily to me as it reminded me of other previously used interfaces. We have a large database of over 350K donors, and Raiser's Edge has no problem handling our volume. The Raiser's Edge 7 is now showing some age in how it's structured and functions, but mostly in look and feel. We have been using Raiser's Edge with our database on premise. With the seismic shift into cloud computing, we are planning to move to a Blackbaud hosted environment, which will, in and of itself, bring us closer to feeling like it's not the 90's anymore. But the good news is that Blackbaud knows that the look and feel, usability, functionality and ability to play well with others need to catch up with the rest of technology, and so they introduced Raiser's Edge NXT a couple of years ago. RE NXT looks modern and fills many checkboxes of what fundraisers need to do their jobs in today's environment. (See Pros to find out more of what I like about RE NXT.)

Raiser's Edge 7 gives you the tools (and/or gives you optional add-on tools) to manage your donor relationships and data in just about any way you can think of. It's a great all-purpose fundraising tool for non-profit organizations. Raiser's Edge NXT (RE NXT) is the next generation, and we are most likely moving to that within the next year. The awesome things about RE NXT are 1. User access to your donor data from anywhere on any device, 2. Unintimidating ease of use for non-techie and techie alike, 3. Open API which means lots of more fantastic compatible tools are being built by Blackbaud partners, 4. Unlimited users - which means now our Board members and many other stakeholders will be able to login and get their reports on the dashboard instead of waiting for emailed or, even worse, hard-copy reports to be run and delivered to them by our staff.

My experience with the Customer Support has been less than stellar. Sometimes it seems like the Customer Support's go-to answer is, "No" or "No, you can't do that." Unless the answer is, "Well, if you buy this other tool we have, then you can do that." But since we have no plans to move off of Blackbaud products, thank heavens they have an amazing Blackbaud Community network where you can ask any question and get tons of advice from folks just like you working in this software daily. Blackbaud Community is now the first place I go when I need support. Many times the question I have has already been asked and answered in the past, and so just searching through the discussions will get me my answer or point me in the right direction, instead of wasting time trying to re-invent the wheel. My fairly high rating in this review on Customer Support is mostly because of Blackbaud Community and our fairly newly assigned account manager.

I use Raiser's Edge as our donor database and the data entry, reporting features are really updated. However, when they came out with NXT, it was a game changer. NXT is amazing! It has a very attractive interface and super user friendly. As soon as you search for a record, consecutive years and all information on the donor is clear to see and it lets you know which donors you should be reaching out to. You could assign donors to others to initiate contact. You could easily access information on your mobile device. It takes the Raiser's Edge data entry interface and completely gives it a makeover. You are easily able to review giving history and all donor information on one page and very clearly. The only thing I don't like about NXT is that the consecutive years aren't always the same as in the donor records in the database version.

I use Raiser's Edge as our donor database and the data entry, reporting features are really updated. However, when they came out with NXT, it was a game changer. NXT is amazing! It has a very attractive interface and super user friendly. As soon as you search for a record, consecutive years and all information on the donor is clear to see and it lets you know which donors you should be reaching out to. You could assign donors to others to initiate contact. You could easily access information on your mobile device. It takes the Raiser's Edge data entry interface and completely gives it a makeover. You are easily able to review giving history and all donor information on one page and very clearly.

The only thing I don't like about NXT is that the consecutive years aren't always the same as in the donor records in the database version.

Raiser's Edge is great for development departments of medium to large nonprofits, schools, etc, especially those with sophisticated fundraising programs. It may not be the best fit for small nonprofits with limited resources in the budget. The Raiser's Edge is an excellent software for cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship and allows for easy tracking of each constituent's relationship with your organization. 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 on's 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.

This is such a great tool to keep track of your constituents. Everything is organized, making it easy to find the information you need with little hassle. It was also relatively to learn how to use it. I had never heard of Raiser's Edge before beginning an internship during college, and without any experience outside of that using it, I was able to find a job where I spend all day using Raiser's Edge. Not being particularly computer-savy, it's almost unbelieveable to me how comfortable I feel using this product.

There always seems to be little kinks and bugs that make little to no sense, and many times even those at Blackbaud don't seem to know why. For example, I work a lot with tributes. Recently I discovered that when you are entering a gift and you have a tribute open, if you go into one of the tribute acknowledgee's records and then back out, RE will check off all of the acknowledgees to acknowledge even if you previously did not have them all checked off. My manager asked why this was happening and how we can fix it, and the short-term suggestion we got was to exit out of the acknowledgee record instead of saving and closing. Frankly, that's a horrible suggestion. Obviously there are going to be times when we need to save and close. I understand you may not have an immediate answer, but I'd rather you not be able to give me a suggestion than to give me a bad one. In short, I think there are many kinks to be worked out and customer service can be improved.

When comparing RE NXT to other products I have used it is about the same in functionality. Prompts are usually pretty intuitive. It is not very customizable. Going back and forth between NXT and the database is time consuming. Kind of like using two products to accomplish one task.

The RE NXT product is easier to use than the database view. You can customize work tiles to easily access your work. Creating List is easier to do than queries. Just starting to create workflows. It looks like it has real potential to prompt actions.

Not all aspects are available in RE NXT. I still need to go to the database view to enter information. Customer service is extremely difficult to get in a timely manner. Chat agents can be abrasive at times. Would help if instructions contained some troubleshooting. Difficult to get real time examples outside of classes, which are not always scheduled when you need them.

The solution has served us well for many years, and the service from the sales and support teams has been one of the best parts of the relationship.

RaisersEdge 7 has tremendous capabilities - perhaps too many. Although an industry leader in market share, for a small organization, we don't use the majority of functions available. Service from our sales support contacts has been very good.

The overall solution is very clunky and difficult to use. While Blackbaud is in the (multi-year) process of migrating functions to their cloud NXT platform, this process is slow and leaves users straddled between an old clunky solution and the functions that have been migrated to their cloud platform. The solution is expensive compared to other simpler solutions that can be better suited to small organizations. The mobile app, while useful, is very limited in its capabilities and seems to be a v1 mobile app.

Horrible. I wouldn't reccomend this company to anyone. Save your money, do your research and go with another vendor.

I enjoyed the upgrades from the old school dinasaur program that was available until NXT. The features were comparable to other software on the market.

THE PRICE!! They were very proud of their product and ultimately did not try to keep our business. They offered their product to us for $30,000 a year for a database with less than 10,000 constituents. I believe they have since lowered their price, but their security breach has had a huge impact on many of our fellow nonprofits. Their customer service is some of the worst I have ever endured and you will have 5+ people contact about the same issue. You're lucky if you get a respose, so I mostly didn't even ask a question.

This is a great product for those who have teams where technology may not be a strong suit or entering into the full RE database is challenging. Our team is on the road often and they are able to quickly add contact reports and get simple constituent profiles on the go. As a database manager, NXT is not sophisticated enough for me to use solely, but I do utilize it occasionally so I am up to speed on the functionality.

Ease of use, integration with The Raiser's Edge database, easy to access via mobile devices, has a pleasant look and feel to the application. Overall, an excellent product!

Attachments do not integrate with RE when loaded through NXT, and there is no way to pull a report or query of attachments made in NXT. A little more integration development so the two systems can talk to one another is probably needed.

Look forward to being done with them as soon as our current contract that renewed for three years against our wishes. Be sure to read the fine print in every document you receive from this dishonest vendor. They are all about revenue and it's the only purpose at every level of their dishonest and money grabbing company.

The pros of their software are outweighed by there incompetent and dishonest staff. This is true all the way from the sales level, customer service, billing and deceitful renewal tactics. This company used to be the best in the business but got too big and stopped caring about their customer and focuses only on their bottom line. Once you commit to a contract it's a miserable process after that. Guarantee.

Functionality, donor records were robust able to enter split gifts.

Cost, user interface, difficult to use, customer support

Let's face it, the base model is the industry standard with all the bells and whistles you'll need. Here's what Raisers Edge does well: Exports, Queries, complex reports, and storing gift data just the way I like it (as the head of fundraising) and just the way my CFO likes it (who knew we could agree!).

Problems are the price, the cobbled-together addons essential for modern fundraising, and service. Here is where RE has gone wrong: they offer addons that don't work well with the base model of RE and the sales people and customer service people will not admit that they weren't intended to work well. It's obviously clunky programming!

I would recommend this software to a large or established non-profit that either brings in a lot of money (over $500k per annum), or is hoping to take fundraising "to the next level." I have used Raiser's Edge with two different organizations

- So many features, reports, queries, and fields. - Highly customizable. - Basic functions are fairly intuitive and easy-to-use. - Scalable, with lots of optional add-on features.

- Complex. If you want to "go deep" with this software, be prepared to invest a lot of time into the process. - Very expensive, and pricing is not dependent upon things like constituent counts (like marketing automation software is doing).

Overall we are very happy with Raiser's Edge NXT and plan to continue using this product into the future.

Easy to use from the start. Works well on mobile devices. Allow fundraisers to use a talk-to-text app to input contact reports for meetings. Blackbaud keeps increasing the functionality and roll out new features. All of our gift officers are happy with this product and use it daily to manage portfolios.

This is not a heavy work system for database managers. Still no events management in this version. Attachments added to records in NXT cannot be seen in database view.

The ease of use for those not accustomed to the traditional Raiser's Edge database, this allows other teams to use it when before they would not have. Ability to access records from anywhere. Reporting is great to easily identify metrics for our organization.

A large number of features that we are very excited for are not yet fully active resulting in us using both NXT and RE OLX. In particular we are waiting for the ability to create donation forms, as well more functionality in the email platform to allow us to add the responses to the records.