Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM vs. Blackbaud eTapestry

It works well enough for fundraising purposes and donor tracking. I think it would be less appropriate for instances or industries where you don't need so many data points on someone. You are able to attach a lot of information to a record so if you don't need that info (simply need contact info for example) you might want a simpler system

Incentivized

As we are a small Foundation with only one Administrative Assistant, eTapestry is perfect for me to keep all of our CRM. Once I got used to how it worked, I found it to be user friendly. If I have any problems, I can either try to find the answer for myself in the extensive library, chat to support or email our Customer Service Representative with questions. I cannot fault either the Support team or Customer Service Representatives I have dealt with over the years as all of them have been knowledgeable and extremely helpful. I would prefer to have better options within the Email section as the templates are very basic. There is another option to use an eTapestry partner, but there are additional costs involved in that. The email templates are OK to use if you wish to send quick information to your database.

Incentivized

• It is incredibly user-friendly! From the first time I opened a constituent profile, I could easily navigate between tabs and find the information I need in a timely fashion without confusion.
• It allows personalization! Depending on what information is most relevant to me, I can organize the widgets that are shown first. I typically look at the same few pieces of information on every profile, so I don't have to dig for it!

Incentivized

• Report Scheduling is great. Reports can be scheduled daily (even on specific days of the week), weekly, or monthly) and auto-emailed.
• Reports can be displayed on the screen, downloaded, or emailed in CSV, excel, or pdf and can have columns pre-sorted in your preferred order.
• Online donations are automatically added to the donor's account and automatically create an account for a new donor.

Incentivized

• The sticky function of data filtering.
• It can be overwhelming because there is so much information.
• The way revenue/gifts are can be confusing. There are also too many tabs to find information.
• There are a lot of little frustrations and tedious little steps to complete.

Incentivized

• You can't use the Back feature on your browser to return to the previous page.
• You can't use it in more than one browser window to compare or analyze information
• The query functionality is complicated and it is hard to get what you're looking for if you're not well trained.

Incentivized

We've covered a lot, but mostly because we are happy with the system overall. There are a few kinks, and sometimes it takes a minute to figure out the right wording to pull a report or the best way to code a new category that we want to track. But Blackbaud is always there to help us, and once things are figured out - they are super simple to replicate. It wouldn't be worth it to switch to a new system and lose of all our information and time put in to mastering the system

Incentivized

We do not always get positive solutions from Etapestry. There are a lot of resources and solutions that you can read about and reach out to. I participate in Community Forums and trainings to see what we can be doing differently.

Incentivized

It's usable and very convenient, but not always intuitive. For example, we had difficulties figuring out how to pull a list of donors from a specific 12-month period. There were many settings and options, so it was very trial and error.

Incentivized

I have never had an issue accessing eTapestry. It does occasionally go down for maintenance. When that happens, they give you a lot of notice and generally schedule maintenance for hours between midnight and 6am so that business won't be disrupted.

Incentivized

The product does what it is supposed to, although there are downsides. There are positive and negatives for every product. This is less expensive alternative for a small organization tracking minimum information.

Incentivized

It is purely dependant on who you reach and speak to. You can call twice in an hour period and get two completely different answers. You can get people who are willing to help, people who just tell you no, or people who have no idea what to do. They need to work harder on training their support people. The chat function works very well for simple questions and is my preferred go-to when seeking help.

Incentivized

I've had nothing but great experience when reaching out for support on this program. The team has always been supportive and polite when answering questions. They have a lot of knowledge to share and provide good insight into the product. It helps to have their perspective on certain issues

Incentivized

In person training is always helpful for a new product however I think that the online tutorials would do just fine.

Incentivized

They explained everything well to us throughout the process. It was easy to find resources needed to answer any questions that we had. Support was also available should we need further assistance from the resources found online. They were also quick to respond to our teams inquiries, which was much appreciated.

Incentivized

Most of our issues were self-inflicted and related to BB's work. We did not "staff up" correctly, our data to be converted was not in great shape and we set some unreasonable goals. With BBs help we were able to clean our data and prep it for conversion and we adjusted the goals to be more achievable with the timeline we were given. We found the BB staff to be responsive and focused, especially when working on-site with us.

Incentivized

I was not there for the implementation of this platform. Unfortunately I am unable to just skip this question as it requires a response, which needs to be fifty characters, so here we are. At thirty four, I need to add a few more words to satisfy this requirement. Done.

Incentivized

When were doing our search, in 2016/2017 we identified three products that might have potential for our use. They were Ellucians Advance, BlackBaud e-CRM and Sales Force. We had 18 years experience with Ellucian, we had several Sales Force installations on campus and very little knowledge of e-CRM. We rejected Ellucian's Advance because at the time they were implementing a new sub-platform and the product was still being developed. Their anticipated completion date did not meet our campaign timeline. We rejected the sales force offerings because we did not have the time or resources to select different apps, tie them together so they shared data correctly and then deal with multiple vendors when there was an issue. BB e-CRM offered us an established, growing platform that was fully integrated internally. It had the capability's we needed and room to grow

Incentivized

I very much prefer eTapestry to Raiser's Edge. I found the separation between the database and web view of Raiser's Edge very disorienting and didn't like having to switch back and forth between the two views to be able to complete certain tasks. I REALLY didn't like that a few tasks had to be done in both database and web view. Although it was worded as an "upgrade", I felt that we lost a lot of functionality, in particular with gift imports. I also didn't like gifts from the website having to land in Online Express, rather than being able to go directly into a constituent account

Incentivized

The product allows us flexibility and scalability for our team.

Incentivized

• Our organization adopted Blackbaud mid-fundraising campaign and completed successfully completed our campaign, raising over $1 billion.
• We were able to identify the wealth capacity of a targeted population of nearly 1,000 incoming parents, 87% of which had major gift level capacity.

Incentivized

• Increased our capacity to fundraise.
• Allowed more opportunity to know our donors (tracking and data collection).
• Limited users - due to steep learning curve - as such less of our development staff know how to use the system to its fullest potential.

Incentivized