Designed for large, complex organizations as well as federated and international nonprofits.
N/A
CharityEngine
Score 4.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
CharityEngine is designed to simplify the complex world of online fundraising for nonprofits, as a nonprofit CRM. Integrated tools for donations, emails, and other elements of fundraising feed data into a central view to make it easier to know and care for donors. The solution boasts secure, payment-ready forms to give users complete control of donors' information.
N/A
Pricing
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
CharityEngine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$350-$700
per month
Professional
$700-$1,500
per month
Enterprise
Call for Customized Pricing
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Blackbaud Enterprise Fundraising CRM
CharityEngine
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Pricing starts based on the CharityEngine core offering along with projected contact and email volume.
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
CharityEngine has the POTENTIAL to be a good CRM, but both unresponsiveness to the more complex problems go unresolved for months at a time. Employee turnover is huge, which is likely because upper management is doing nothing to solve the internal problems. I would NOT recommend this CRM at this point. While CharityEngine does allow reasonably robust storage and querying of data if you plan to send emails through your CRM, look elsewhere. CharityEngine's framework is clunky and counter-intuitive, in addition to frequently just not working at all.
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!
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
There are a lot of frustrating things about the general usage of CharityEngine. It syncs with a nine-digit zip code database, but doesn't automatically populate exportable fields with this data - it must be manually requested for each record. Buttons that allow a user to quickly move to a specific area of the data in a customer record frequently stop working after updates; are found by users and reported, and then take a month or longer to be fixed. A clunky and counter-intuitive "creative" database frequently fails completely and is always slow.
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.
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.
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
CharityEngine has allowed our organization to grow in the past few years, but it has not kept up with industry trends and avoids making changes and updates requested by users.
Our overall business objectives cannot be met with CharityEngine alone. We must export data and use other applications to generate the data we need.
