Blackbaud CRM

Review Blackbaud

Kommentare: i find it to be a very useful tool.

Vorteile:

It stores so much data about a constituent.

Nachteile:

It is sometime tough to locate datathat I need.

Great CRM for non-profit

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

Communication with other software such as Constant Contact.

SAVE YOUR MONEY!

Kommentare: During the initial presentation, they bragged about how useful they are for small non-profits. LIES! In the three years of use, I became farther and farther behind. Our contract started in May but we didn't even start using it until October. So much training was needed, and I'm relatively smart when it comes to software, but I needed unbelievable amounts of training. This might be a good software for large organizations with a department of accounting folks, but small organizations need to run a different direction. Look at Araize, they have a fantastic product!

Vorteile:

The best part was the ability to create recurring entries. That is, until it was taken away with the switch to web only use. With over 200 recurring entries every month, it's a drain on my time and energy.

Nachteile:

Customer support is the WORST. They must hire random people off the street. In three years, I think I talked to one person who knew anything about accounting. And don't get me started on pricing - a 25% increase after the initial contract, which was supposed to convert to an annual fee, but they are claiming it's a 3-year. Nobody in my organization signed a three year contract. Not when their software is NOT the best for small organizations.

Blackbaud is a great quality, scalable solutions

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Keep Your Donors In Line

Kommentare: Excellent! It was brought efficiency to the office.

Vorteile:

Excellent donor management and donation tracking.

Nachteile:

The vast amount of features can be difficult to learn.

Avoid at all costs

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Robust CRM platform, but feels overcomplicated and outdated at times

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

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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

Broken login management and frustratingly confusing terms

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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

Just doesn't do enough

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

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

CRM software for rec donations

Kommentare: If your business is receiving donations this is a great product to use and keep your customers updated daily.

Vorteile:

It's an ideal software for receiving donations. The company has done a lot in the past few years on listening to their customers on what they want and need. And great way to keep in touch with customers.

Nachteile:

There's a learning curve and difficult for new users who are not tech savy. Should be more user friendly.

BlackBaud is a hard NO

Kommentare: Our request for a cancellation of agreement went ignored. They seem to have no compassion for a small nonprofit struggling to pay its bills.

Vorteile:

Nothing at all! One of our board members entered into an agreement without board authorization. When we try to undo this agreement, they came at us with their lawyer.

Nachteile:

One of our board members signed up and left our board. He was not authorized to enter into disagreement so we tried to cancel it with our attorney. We’re a small nonprofit and never use the platform. BlackBaud send us many threatening letters, and even though our attorney responded, we made a years worth of payments. We had numerous request for cancellation ignored, and as of today they’re still trying to collect.

If you don't have it and are considering this product keep on looking!

Kommentare: It is so frustrating. Customer service is an absolute joke

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Great if you put in the work!

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Blackbaud is the gold standard

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Very Robust CRM

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Powerful tool for the Right Organization!

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Great way to raise funds!

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

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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.

Blackbaud is great for non-profits!

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Lackluster Customer Service, Limited Flexibility, and Expensive

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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

A Decent SIS

Kommentare: It has been lukewarm at best. When everything works it's ok.

Vorteile:

I like that it connects all of our facets of our school under one umbrella so each user only has one login to all the information they need.

Nachteile:

Their customer service is dreadful and slow. It is impossible to speak with anyone from tech support when problems arise.

CRM with some hiccups

Kommentare: Blackbaud CRM is a fine starter CRM software, but there are some administrative items that could use some work. Mainly duplicate entries and their search feature.

Vorteile:

I like that CRM can easily and quickly talk to other programs that we end up using. It's a one stop shop for donor stewardship.

Nachteile:

There isa duplication issue on Blackbaud that means sometimes 1 donor can show up 10+ times, and it's more work on the back end to get it to be removed. Search features can use some work.

I get anxiety every time I have to touch this tool

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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

Nachteile:

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).

Industry Leader for a Reason

Kommentare: 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.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.

Probably the best CRM for large schools

Vorteile:

It is more open the its closest competitors allowing for the possibility of in house IT customization. However this are not as upgrade-able as the company says they should be.

Nachteile:

Not a mature product, still has may growing pains to be worked out.

Dysfunctional company

Kommentare: Awful.

Vorteile:

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.

Nachteile:

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.