Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Batch entry. That's it. If ALL you do are massive fundraisers where you bring in a thousand donations of 10 bucks apiece in one day, then RE has the batch entry system for you.

Cons

Blackbaud's contracts all have clauses that prevent users from making derogatory statements or posting negative reviews. The contract allows them to lock you out, kick you off, charge for the remainder of the contract, blah blah blah. And they enforce it. Ask yourself why a decent software would need something like that? This is NOT a relational database, and if you understand anything about software file structure, then that explains why RE is so flawed: If someone hits all of those categories, they will appear three times. Ask for their phone or email and they are now listed six times. Process to get rid of dupe listings of the same name loses all of the field access with the exception of addresses - because it's not relational that's the only way they can do it. Raisers Edge NXT has been designed to hide the 'background' so you have less access to work-arounds, but in order to do that they have had to 'assume' what fields are really important to us to be able to export from a specific query. RE is designed to archive a ton of information, it is simply not designed to use it or get it out. Support is dismal, and most support staff have never been users; not customizable; clunky, slow; embedded Word is out-of-date and difficult to update; proprietary e-mail communication tool extremely limited; nothing is intuitive; research analytics and events modules are extremely weak. A waste of money.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Integration with onsite systems made it easy to use.

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT

Reasons for Switching to Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT