Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT vs Bloomerang Comparison

Nothing comes to mind. I inherited this software when I began working here.

The interface was unfriendly, the search engine awkward, and getting reports was very difficult.

The ability to do so many things at an affordable cost and its SO user friendly with an amazing customer service that puts it over the edge when comparing against other similar database products (E-Tapestry). I'm able to manage donors and volunteers. I can do my email marketing, direct mail and manage my website in one system. Its easy to customize and there is an email template builder.

You don't get the power and strength that you do with Raiser's Edge by Blackbaud, but that comes at a cost. So if you're a smaller non profit institution with a smaller list

The software is easy to use and the reporting can be robust, with the ability to pull from the different tabs into one report.

The organization record type only allows for one contact. Though we use the Relationships to track additional employees I think a separate section for those org records would be easier to track employees.

My favorite thing about Bloomerang is the ease of use - it is extremely intuitive, especially compared to a product like Raiser's Edge. I also appreciate the Customer Service - every inquiry is responded to in a timely manner, and customer service representatives go above and beyond to help.

The initial sign-on period was a bit frustrating, as our representative did not seem that knowledgeable and did not give great advice. However, in the years since this, we have been impressed with the Bloomerang team and have not had any bad experiences since.

Bloomerang is an amazing donor software. It has made our fundraising more personalized and easy to use. We went from Raiser's Edge from the 1990s to Bloomerang, and Bloomerang has been a breath of fresh air for reporting purposes, working with constituent data, and much more.

The only features I haven't liked on the software are the reflections of in-kind donations on a constituent's profile and the social media integration. I don't like that in-kind gifts are not reflected on the graph shown at the constituent's profile. We have lots of donors who give large in-kind gifts, and it makes it seem like their gifts aren't as important as cash donations. They deserve better recognition. The social media integration issues are what I mentioned earlier in this survey: our audience doesn't use Twitter hardly at all. We wish there would be an integration with Facebook and/or Instagram.

Thank you Lexi for the kind words. Love that Bloomerang was able to bring a personalized touch to your nonprofit.

User friendly, intuitive, flexible, affordable

Sometimes the flexibility can be overwhelming when choosing how to set up custom fields

It is easy to use Bloomerang to find donors and easily see their giving history, run reports and generate acknowledgment letters.

It can be confusing when converting that household accounts are made as well as individual accounts for the people in the household. We have not done emails out of bloomerang just yet.

Greater than the Bloomerang CRM itself is the company's incredible support team that is not only quick to respond and meaningfully engage, but does so humanely. Too many vendors staff their support teams with specialists who are technically proficient, but lack the ability to translate their knowledge into kind and understanding support. Without this type of support, clients like me would be left frustrated,...

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There are a lot of strategic opportunities for the Bloomerang team to take advantage of as they continue to grow as a company, and an area where I'd like to see growth is with third-party integrations. There is currently a MailChimp integration in the pipeline, but I'd also love to see the door open to platform access through API integration services such as Zapier, which would allow customers like me to easily and securely connect Bloomerang to other key software in use within our department and organization.

Nic, you rock! Good news: we now have a Zapier and Mailchimp integration! https://bloomerang.co/features/integrations/

Bloomerang is intuitive and easy to use. Creating and reporting with custom field has never been easier and really allows you to customize it to your needs rather than using a standard field for something else. The ability to create embedded forms is a lifesaver. The integrated email capabilities save me from having to purchase another solution like Constant Contact. Plus, these interactions are automatically recorded in the donor/prospects data file. The integrated DonorSearch option is convenient, useful and cost-effective.

If my organization ran a ton of events, I'm not sure this would be my optimal solution. Currently, there is only one level of access - so I can't let a Board Member in to look around because any accidental changes they make would be permanent. I know that Bloomerang is working on this though.

When I was hired by this organization, I inherited Raiser's Edge. I found it extremely difficult to navigate and was getting little in return for our pricey investment. After careful research, I found Bloomerang to be the ideal choice for our needs. Every aspect of this donor software, from data entry to reporting, has been easy and helpful for tracking donor activity and meeting our development needs. In addition, customer support is outstanding. Their representatives are always available, helpful, and considerate.

Not much. I have yet to discover the many capabilities of Bloomerang, especially integrating with our social media. However, as much as I dislike the time I need to set aside learning more about its capabilities, I cannot blame the software for doing what I need to be better informed. The software actually makes the learning curve easy.

Bloomerang has great customer service, easy tutorials, tons of webinars, and educational offerings that are very informative. It was an easy transition to Bloomerang and we continue to learn all the features to best serve our needs. We are enjoying the email feature (no more 3rd party services needed) and the ease of getting mass mailings out. Our tracking of donor history and reporting is constantly getting better. I like the customer service and user-friendly program the most.

We are still learning the many options before us. We started with a larger package and have not scaled that back. If we need to bring it back, we will. I'm learning new payment features which we may embark but the public feels very secure with PayPal.

Thank you Lee Ann for the thorough feedback! Happy to hear you are utilizing all of our free content too.

EVERYTHING!! I cannot say enough good about this product. The customer service is out of this world and I can ask a question via chat and have an answer immediately. THey are constantly gathering ideas for upgrades from users and rolling them out. It's extremely easy to use, compared to our old Raiser's Edge Software. The price is less than any other product we researched and they are always following up to ensure our happiness. The software caters to prospect cultivation and offers tons of preloaded reports or that. The ease of creating a report will leave you speechless.

I miss my batch feature, but they are working on creating that and should release it in the future. Otherwise, I haven't had any issues. I'm constantly referring and recommending this product and they reward you with each referral.

Compatibility with our prior DRM which was a Blackbaud product and ability to have a seamless conversion process. It's cloud-base platform greatly assists our "mission from anywhere" mentality and ease of use/learning. Not having to pay for # of users is also a great cost-benefit.

We had a learning curve trying to replicate identical reports from prior DRM. We also found some of the constituent data (mobile vs home) were flopped and needed to be corrected.

Wow Seth! Such kind a kind review. I will certainly let the conversions team know. Thank you!

It makes sense, easy to use, the support staff is quick, friendly and knowledgeable.

It's been a little treaty with events that do not require payments, the online registration and the response. I am sure it is an issue on the "users" end.

Thanks Teresa for the kind words! Happy to hear we're top on your list.

My company used Raiser's Edge for many years before switching over to Bloomerang and that was one of the best days in my working career. I love that we can immediately get a sense of a donor as their page comes up with the Giving Summary and Level of Engagement. I also appreciate being able to quickly see what the latest, largest, first, and lifetime giving is at a glance. Pulling reports, mailing lists, and financials is very user-friendly, too. Having trainings available to return to for refreshers and references is very handy. Using Bloomerang has been a game-changer for me in keeping track of donor information and then having the ability to compile that information in almost endless ways.

The most time consuming part of Bloomerang that feels a bit clunky is the creation of households. It requires data entry for one of its members, a new constituent record for the other member of the household, and then going back to create a household and link the two donors. It feels like there could be an easier way to get that information and create those relationships without so much back and forth.

Thank you for your feedback regarding households Hannah. I will pass that along to our product teams!

In my last job we used Raisers Edge which is an amazing product but was much to much for us. Bloomerang is completely right sized for a small to mid-sized organization without a huge or complex development team.

I would like the more control over the merge functions and I this this is on the product development list.

The ease of use for fundraising team is what initially attracted us to the platform, and is still the compelling value for us.

Working with Bloomerang has been the most frustrating experience. Every week there is a new excuse for why they are behind. We switched from Raiser's Edge for a few reasons... but working with Blackbaud was far, far easier than the empty promises encountered with Bloomerang. Our conversion was slated to be completed in early February. It is now the end of May and they are still pushing us off. As...

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The ease of functionality. I used Raiser Edge before and it was so cumbersome to do any type of detailed research. Boomerang is so user friendly and I don't have to get my IT department to help me solve issues. Boomerang's customer service takes care of that.

Just a couple of downsides so far. I lost a few descriptive fields when I did my data transfer. they were not critical but important. Secondly, some of the reports have taken me a bit of time to pull together simply becasue I am not a tech person. But I guess you could say that is my issue and not Boomerang's.

Ease of use. Excellent customer service. Training materials and courses are the best in the industry. Their focus on donor retention will improve your bottom line. The reporting feature is the easiest and best I've seen. Mobile accessible.

Still working out some kinks but I'm pleased by the transparency of their system updates and receptiveness to customer feedback to shape future releases. Their custom forms and email templates could be sharper and I wish they could integrate with Mailchimp.

Great to hear you have had such an excellent experience with our onboarding team and support/training materials, Tim! We're always looking to improve those, and it good to know the efforts paying off. You'll be happy to know that we now have a MailChimp integration! https://bloomerang.co/blog/new-feature-bloomerang-mailchimp-integration/ Since Bloomerang acquired Kindful, we have drastically upgraded our online giving tools, as well as added new functionality like peer-to-peer! You can check them out here: https://bloomerang.co/features/online-giving-tools/

The best part of the software is that it is so user friendly. I've used Razors Edge, Donor Perfect, Salesforce and a variety of other products - I now call those products my dinosaurs. They made updates on antiquated database software increasing the number of steps one had to take to get a report, add a new donor or create communications. Bloomerang is quick, user friendly and easy to use. I also really appreciate the great customer service. They respond quickly and are always very helpful.

Some of the templates in the email section look old. I wish they had a better graphics designer on board.

This software is easy to navigate and intuit. It is built with small businesses & nonprofits in mind, which is obvious in it's design. It is great to be able to track so much data about our constituents in one place, as well as to link that data with transactions, contact information, and even email communication. It's not perfect, but it's improving all the time and is so much better than the other many options we tried!

The email builder (event after the most recent update) is pretty primitive and does not provide all of design the flexibility we'd like - we're an arts organization and our visual branding is really important to us. We wish that there were ways to import formatted blocks from one template into another, to change the background color of a single block, or to manipulate the code more easily. I also wish that we had the options to separate types of transactions (we receive payments for art sales as well as donations) more easily so that constituents' purchases could be separated from their charitable giving.

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