High end product, poor customer service

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Blackbaud

Overall, we like and dislike this product. We are learning to live with some of the quirks of it because the organizational tools for fundraising seem to be quite good for us.

Pros

What I like most about this product is that as a fundraiser, I have many tools that keep me organized and remind me to thank our donors.

Cons

My co-worker who uses this software for only adding donations has a very difficult time with it. She says it takes way too many steps to add donations. It is also frustrating that you have to create a new record for someone who has been memorialized by a gift. It seems odd to add someone into your record base that is deceased and there is a cap on the number of constituents you can have in the database without having to pay more. The reporting pages are confusing and difficult to understand how to set up a goal and see our progress toward it. There are many things like this that we come across that are frustrating to us.

Great product if you

Pros

Ease of integration for the front line fundraisers

Cons

It is not yet as flexible as the Database View (RE7)

Raiser's Edge Lifer Rant

Pros

My biggest likes for the Raiser's Edge are the various modules: Events, Membership and Online Express. I can organize the information and pull it back out in queries so easily. The canned reporting is not bad either. They pretty much have every kind of basic report you could need. You can pull some pretty decent reports that track actions, solicitors, giving and profiles. The key is making sure your data is clean and organized. Speaking of which, Raiser's Edge has done a great job of improving it's data clean up functions. They have improved duplicate removals. They have added e-mail and phone clean ups. And they are always on top of making sure their clients are heard (even if it takes them a little while to deliver).

Cons

The reports have aged out at this point in the desktop version (non-cloud). Development departments are looking for different ways to report their money and we are now depending on Crystal Reports to constantly fill that void. I wished the reports were more malleable and you could really build out the layouts to accommodate what staff wants to see. The biggest thing I hear in terms of complaints from my staff are the number of clicks to get a process done, whether entering an event on a record to recording a membership. Sure we can set up default settings for many of the procedures, but there is still that need sometimes to have to go through and enter manually.

Good and robust software!

Very good.

Pros

Integration with onsite systems made it easy to use.

Cons

Hard to train other users on how to use with our systems.