I used TeamRaiser for multiple peer to peer fundraising events in my previous position. It was used by everyone on my team and some other members throughout our organization. It helped us organize and report for our fundraising year over year. It was integral in projecting our future fundraising as well.
Pros
Monitor fundraising progress online and offline
Track fundraising historically for each participant and event
Makes registering easy for the participant
Make fundraising convenient and organized
Cons
Sometimes it's clunky to use on the back end
It's not easy to set up
Can be confusing and meticulous to update
Likelihood to Recommend
It was well suited for our peer to peer events and not appropriate for our ticketed events.
TeamRaiser is used by our Philanthropy team to manage a Do It Yourself (DIY) fundraising website. This allows our supporters to host their own online fundraising activities, such as in celebration of a special occasion or related to a sporting or corporate event.
Pros
Allows supporters to independently fundraise.
Simple website design that can be adapted for a DIY website.
Allows for easy updates and changes.
Cons
Too many options so it can be hard to navigate.
Requires a deeper HTML understanding to really get the most out of it.
Would be better if the interface was similar to other original Blackbaud products.
Likelihood to Recommend
TeamRaiser is well suited for peer-to-peer fundraising activities, such as large pledge-based events like walks and runs or DIY fundraisers of many different types.
In the Development Department, we use TeamRaiser as a fundraiser tool. Specifically, we have created an event called a Virtual Food Drive that allows people to fundraise instead of hosting a traditional food drive. This helps make their contributions have a greater impact on their community and enhances their ability to feed more kids, seniors, and families in the Central Florida area. It also helps on a logistical level, as we are not required to pick up donations, nor are they required to drop them off, storing, sorting, and distribution of donated goods. Raising funds through a Virtual Food Drives allows us to distribute more food and feed more people than a traditional food drive.
Pros
Offers the ability to really customize a campaign on TeamRaiser.
Provides milestones/badges that can be earned for participants.
Provides custom pages that can be easily linked to a campaign.
Gives the ability to send coaching emails to participants and for participants to send emails through the TeamRaiser system.
Has a big support community.
Cons
Has a difficult learning curve to make campaigns customizable.
Does not offer any drag and drop interfaces.
A lot of details and settings that can be confusing.
No automatic recognition for returning participants.
When copying from a previous campaign, everything is a manual update.
Likelihood to Recommend
I can only speak from a DIY fundraising perspective, but TeamRaiser is definitely a beast. It has a lot of capability, but if you are short on time, money, and expertise, it may be overwhelming and/or not a right fit for a campaign. It's important to have an initial design team to build a campaign and to make a check-list for each campaign set up, as one wrong setting can break the entire thing.
But, it is also a powerful tool that can be used to raise a lot of money with the right marketing plan behind it.