Blackbaud eTapestry vs. DonorSnap

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

We reviewed more than 100 donor management software applications and found DonorSnap to be right for our organization. Sure, there are the 800 lb gorillas out there, but their cost was overall not economical for our financial budget. The DonorSnap platform is rich with features and their online support is quick to respond.

In the beginning, one of our concerns was a potential learning curve in understanding the application. Frankly speaking, it is easy to navigate once you play around with it, attend a webinar and watch some of their help videos. We were not intimidated and are happy with our choice.

There is probably not a donor management software that is perfect. We like that there are many user-defined fields which provide greater adaptability to meet our needs. No need for custom work.

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 software is rich with features.
• Their online support is quick to respond.
• Many user-defined fields which provide greater adaptability to meet our needs.
• Easy to navigate.

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

• I really can't think of a thing!

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

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

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

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

Without a doubt, DonorSnap does everything that I need, without causing fits of anger - unlike the previously listed programs! Reporting was an issue with all of the others; not so with DS. Being able to create a report and export into Excel to manipulate makes so much sense and the job so much easier to work with.

Incentivized

The product allows us flexibility and scalability for our team.

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

• We spend so much less time doing data entry and generating reports than we spent with our previous four database providers. This is a very inexpensive donor management system in comparison with the others that we have used saving us thousands of dollars annually.
• DonorSnap has more than met our business objectives of being able to track donors, donations, payments, registrations, etc. Working from the cloud provides me with quick access to information regardless of location - even the mobile app is great!

Incentivized