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For Non-Profits, Common Ground vs. Raiser's Edge?
lanimreT writes "I work at a medium-sized non-profit organization. We've been considering a switch from our current constituent relationship manager (CRM) The Raiser's Edge to Common Ground, a non-profit-focused CRM built on SalesForce. I would like to hear from other organizations that have already done this. What features are present in Raiser's Edge but missing in Common Ground? Is your workflow improved by the new software? If you had it to do over again, would you make the switch?"
it's killer, dude
I looked at moving FROM Raisers Edge to Common Ground and found it lacking a lot of features. As much as I would like to ditch the God awful expense of Raisers Edge, it really is the best fund raising software on the market. The place where Raisers Edge really shines is the query builder. An average, not very skilled user can be trained to run some seriously complex queries in a day or two. Raisers Edge builds the kind of queries that will have skilled SQL DBAs scratching their heads and saying things like, "I never realized you could do that with SQL." It will construct cursors and arrays and other fairly complex data structures on the fly.
The downside of Raisers Edge is the cost, and the complexity. It is a complex system and Blackbaud seems to go out of their way to make it next to impossible to migrate out of the system. It is also a resource hog. Under normal load it will run fine. As soon as you throw one of the previously mentioned uber queries on it, the poor thing will grind to a halt. The other day we did a 50,000 constituent export on a dual, quad-core Xeon box and it took two and a half hours to finish. The query was complex and involved lots of joins, but stilll...
Raisers Edge is one of those programs that if you haven't gotten used to it, you probably won't know what you're missing. I'd suggest giving Common Ground a shot and if it sucks, you can always step up to the gold standard. If it gets the job done for you, then you save all of the maintenance fees that come with Raisers Edge.
Make sure that you get a GOOD demo of Common Ground though. Realize that the canned reports probably won't get the job done and that you are going to have to write your own. I had a hard time getting clear answers from Common Ground about their reporting interface. Also make sure that you have the opportunity to try to build some custom queries with their interface. The application is only worth while if you can actually get your information back out of it.
Make sure you consider how many users you are going to have on it and what the load will be. Make sure that you consider your bandwidth requirements. Consider the previously mentioned 50,000 constituent export. Can Common Ground even handle that? Will it absolutely bring the system / internet connection to its knees?
It has a community around non profits. You might get a different perspective from different types of people who use it.
Wow, $100/month/seat for a non-profit.
There is the reputation of Raiser's Edge being expensive, but it sounds like this growing
competitor Convio is up there too. How can a small non-profit put out that dough for a member
management software suite.
Manila folders might be more effective for very small non-profits.
I work for a large non-profit. We use Peoplesoft with Goldmine and we are moving to Siebel for the donations/fund development systems I think. I'm out of that side now. Outside the US for our smaller offices we use home grown stuff.
I'm curious if there are too many people here with hands on with both these packages, it seems a pretty niche type thing to have worked with either. But maybe I'm wrong.
There's a desktop CRM solution - TntMPD that has been extended out to support larger endeavors. It's Free as in Beer - not FOSS though. I use it, (I raise the funds that cover the cost of my employment myself) and I couldn't imagine life without it. So I thought I'd throw that out there for anyone that might be interested in the general topic. I wouldn't use if it for an organization system, but it works very nicely to extend data out to the people doing the actual fund development. We don't do central fund raising so we've got thousands of people doing that.
I wonder what it would take to tweak a FOSS solution to fit this need. It would be fun and just looking at the pricing on the two options you've linked, I would think it could be profitable to build and support it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm a 11+ year admin of RE, and yes, while the system does have serious issues, and some areas can be downright frustrating to deal with, it is the best out there.
CivicCRM, an open source db solution is one thing that I've been looking at as an alternative, however just for the query building system in RE, there's nothing out there that I've seen that even comes close, excluding large Oracle systems.
It sure wasn't his defense.
*me ducks*
Finding common ground, IMHO, is almost always preferable to stabby-slashy murder, no matter if your motive is profit or the welfare of man.
(Yes, I have karma to burn, someone had to write it, etc...)
Emotions! In your brain!
We are a larger small (in other words, not quite medium) nonprofit and are looking into switching from home-brew spreadsheets and databases to using DonorPerfect (online) http://www.donorperfect.com/
It is nice having these on-line services that require nothing to install and nothing to update. Plus, it works with Linux+Firefox, which is a must. We have so many projects going all the time, such offerings are very compelling.... as long as you have rock solid Internet (which we do- Cox Fiber). I will pass on info about Common Ground, also.
http://yergler.net/blog/2010/04/22/civicon-plenary-what-are-we-paying-for/
Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but the last time I checked the real problem was the lack of anything suitable for small - to mid-sized groups.
Raiser's Edge will surely do darned near anything, but you have to have both the budget and the dedicated staff to make it worthwhile. The average small non-profit lacks both of those resources.
What would be really wonderful is a small, easy to use but flexible system that creates easily exportable files structures.
Sadly the norm seems to be Filemaker hacks thats some well-intended volunteer created just before leaving town.
(We won't talk about inheriting ten years of fundraising data, each year in seperate file, with changing field names and data types, from seven different programs ranging between dBase, FM, Excel, and Word...)
(Or that the volunteer neglected to leave behind the admin password because he didn't want anyone messing with his masterpiece.)
Three Squirrels
What do you call a MEDIUM size nonprofit? How many individual donations a year/people in the database?
For a while, from about 1999-2007, I was doing some IT consulting almost exclusively with nonprofits, and worked extensively with Raiser's Edge. Raiser's Edge is a deeply entrenched product in a unique niche marketplace. It always seemed like most of the big nonprofits used it in some fashion, and all the really small nonprofits just get along with a weird excel spreadsheet.
(It does seem like an organization could donate to money to start a serious FOSS CRM system for small to medium nonprofits... it's a huge need)
Raiser's Edge is a resource hog and it seemed like nobody at Blackbaud cared about helping to make things faster. Back in the Sybase database versions, nobody realized you could put different database files on different HD's to speed up queries. We also once had a hefty support contract and were down over 25 days because they wouldn't/couldn't fix the database... eventually we needed to Fedex them a copy of the database, which they Fedex'd to Sybase, Sybase back to Blackbaud, and Blackbaud back to us. I asked: I drive by the Sybase headquarters in Emeryville every day, can I just drop it off to make it faster? Answer: No.
Queries and exports can be super slow: put one in at 10am... check after lunch. Make some changes and check just before going home.
Raiser's seems to be the best alternative in a very small pool of candidates, and you're most likely to hire people who have experience with it.
I'm currently in the process of helping a medium sized international NGO migrate from Salesforce to CiviCRM.
During our requirements analysis we found that:
Do yourself a favor, and give it a look.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
a) I gave you money unsolicited, for your cause. I only give when I can, and want to. Almost NEVER is it due to a solicitation or campaign.
b) Please don't send me unsolicited materials, you are wasting your (our) money and I resent that a portion of my donation is being churned back into solicitations and not the original purpose.
c) Don't sell my name to other charities. I know, it is a fund raiser (maybe?) but I will NOT respond to their solicitations. They are wasting their money sending me pleas...
d) Please remove my name from your list when I ask, (usually the "c" listers, but sometimes the "a" lister too!). If I go thru the trouble of asking to be removed, I will REALLY not EVER donate to that organization.
e) Just because the return address on my envelope doesn't match the address on the check I am still just one person. Please don't harvest this extra info into your database and SEND ME TWO of everything! What a double waste of money.
f) It would be nice if you sent the tax-deduction acknowledgment letter, but just once at the end of the year is fine.
BTW - I do check the efficacy of your charity before I give.
I don't mean to be dickish about this, but there are more good causes than I can support, so this is just part of how I chose which to give to.
In short, your CRM software should allow you to check the "hey this guy will give us money if we DON'T bug him" box.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I have been using Sage's Fundrasing 100 for the last 8 years. It is a decent product. However Sage is killing it off and hopefully migrating their customer base to their Millennium product. So far I'm not thrilled with Millennium but they are making changes to it to accommodate the functionality that FR100 users are accustom to. Something to look at as an option.
Another option is to look at GiftWorks. It is a good program for small to medium nonproftis. If you are on the large side of mediums it may not work well for you.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with your take. Trouble is, they wouldn't do that sort of thing if it didn't work. The honest truth is that a lot of people donate sporadically or impulsively to non-profit organizations for various reasons (family member comes up to them for some fund-raising activity, usually). Consequently, the non-profit can send a notice to remind the person that, hey, they donated to the non-profit in the past - would they like to do it again? Most of the time, the answer is "no", but it's yes often enough where they more than make back any money they put into the campaign, and certainly make more net than they would've made if they sat around and waited for the occasional check to float through.
It's annoying, but it's life.
When you fill out information, please make it legible. Especially your creatively spelled name. Data entry is a bitch, and sometimes we just make our best guess, knowing we most likely got it wrong.
Your complaint (e) is right on the mark. There were some supporters who had no less than 5 separate entries in the database. Every time they sent a check or came to event, apparently they were re-entered. Being a Senate campaign, apparently they didn't think it was worth the trouble of eliminating duplicates, and besides, it made it look like there were more supporters than there really were.
As far as (b), we tended to add everyone who gave an email address to the email list unless they specifically opted out. If we've got your email address, it is much cheaper for us to email you rather than pay postage.
I also sympathize with (a). My fraternity volunteered to help out with a telethon. Came to find out the job they gave us was to punish all the people who had donated the previous year by calling them up and asking them to donate again this year! I called a few people, but felt like too much of a dick, so I sandbagged it for the rest of the evening.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I work for a very large non-profit. We use an older version Sungard/BSR Advance, with a bunch of specially-made front-ends, third-party reporting tools, etc., all hitting the Oracle back end directly. Most of us barely touch the actual client.
That said, the client isn't too bad. And the product certainly supports just about anything you'd want to throw at it. Of course, if you're dumping Raiser's Edge due to expense, Advance would probably not be the way to go.
Have you looked at Tessitura? It's especially nice if you're in the arts or any other type of non-profit that does ticketing.
JJ
I'm employed by a nonprofit that's using GiftWorks for volunteer time management. It's full of bugs, tech support never has answers, and names just get lost in the queries. It's cheap and not worth even free. It's a startup by the Chilisoft leftovers, the buyout that Sun killed.
We (I) bought Paradigm back in 1999, it is, was, a wonderful system with stellar support. Then JSI sold it to Best Software, publishers of Best100 and Millenium. Best Software ran the code base into the ground then tried to migrate to Best50, which was trash. We hung tight with Paradigm. Best Software makes Raiser's Edge look desirable.
Nonprofit software sucks right now. DonorPerfect is probably the most usable of a bad bunch.
Is it true, as in backed by data taken from many non-profits and shown to be statistically valid, or is it one of those taken-for-granted truths that everyone THINKS is true, with just enough sporadic validation to make everyone believe it?
I get the odds when it comes to fund raising via mass-mailing -- blather about a good cause and mail enough envelopes and you might make a profit, get half-assed careful about your target audience (ie, no pro-gay mailings to rural Oklahoma, etc) and you are kind of guaranteed a profit.
But I wonder about one-time giving. We've given money to a few charities on a one-time basis before and its amazing the volume of crap you get, over time, without ever re-donating. Years later. I know the per-piece costs are lower than it might seem, but for a $25 donation I'd swear they've wrung a lot of the profit out two years later.
Check out http://www.iwave.com/ . We use it and sugarcrm. iWave is great for researching lots of different things and sugar crm community version is free.
a) I gave you money unsolicited, for your cause. I only give when I can, and want to. Almost NEVER is it due to a solicitation or campaign.
b) Please don't send me unsolicited materials, you are wasting your (our) money and I resent that a portion of my donation is being churned back into solicitations and not the original purpose.
You realize that the reason they do these campaigns is that they work, right? That charities actually raise funds from the tactics that you don't want your donation going towards?
If you don't want charities doing this, then you have to convince their other supporters not to support them via these means, because otherwise it's the only way they can survive.
And donating money doesn't give you a say in the organization, any more than giving someone ten bucks entitles you to tell them how to spend it. If you want to be part of a decision-making process, join the organization or buy shares in a company.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I've been in IT for quite some time now and work for a large nonprofit in the upper midwest that recently moved to common ground/salesforce from a traditional client server solution. In addition to Common Ground I also have access to and work with Raiser's Edge.
The fact of the matter is that people, not software per se, generally determines the effectiveness of whatever solution is applied to the challenge of tracking people, transactions, and the many types of relationships nonprofits need to mange.
Consequently, instead of tossing the proverbial note in a bottle on slashdot and seeing what comes back you should be polling your users, your IT staff, and those that do or can understand what your organization is both capable and incapable of using, supporting, and growing.
Next, organize it, prioritize it, and cost it.
You will find that what you need from a nonprofit-centric crm is unexpected, hard to document, and not easily matched with any one tool on the market. But at least by taking the above approach it is your requirements, and not vendor brochures or the emotive proclamations in this thread (present company included), that will drive your selection process.
For my organization with IN PARTICULAR the common ground/salesforce platform works well. You have different needs, most certainly, and what works for us may not work for you.
Good luck!
I'm IT Director for a nonprofit 501(c)3 with $6M budget and 250 people scattered around the world, plus probably that many more heavily involved volunteers.
We tried SugarCRM and it works well for CRM, but isn't non-profit specific, so it doesn't "speak the language". That made it very complicated for non-techies and non-sales people to use.
GoldMine was a small disaster that I pulled the plug on before it became a large disaster.
Raiser's Edge does everything, but is way out of our price range. It is also a pure Microsoft solution, which would be a bummer for our Mac & Linux folks.
We currently are using eTapestry. It does a fine job and is web-based, but it was bought by BlackBaud (Raiser's Edge) who have a long history of buying competitors and killing them off. And while far cheaper than Raiser's Edge, it isn't exactly cheap.
So we're currently in beta for rolling out CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a LAMP/Drupal web-based application. Installation is a little bit of a pain, mainly because the repos have all upgraded to PHP 5.3, but it still wants PHP 5.2. If you have LAMP skills, do it yourself, or if not then just pay one of the plethora of CiviCRM consultants to do it for you; it'll still be loads cheaper than Raiser's Edge.
Once it's installed, it's a dream. Easy to customize. Easy to do data entry, either onesie-twosie, or mass entry. I was able to import a CDF from eTap quickly and easily. Great searching, great duplicate checking. It supports every payment gateway imaginable. And all the little rough edges are smoothed away. This is a product which clearly is well-designed and well-built.
Stop throwing away your money, and just try it. But don't short-change yourself with a cheap little shared hosting job. Colo a box in a datacenter someplace to run this.
*and* owned by a foundation. Advanced query, hundreds of reports, web, inventory, APIs, win/mac/linux, way less money: worth checking out.
Forgot to add the link:
http://www.inresonance.com/GN
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Hey.
We are using another blackbaud product, financial edge. We have 2 different currencies, and the database isn't designed for this. massive choke. You actually have to instantiate a new database and keep them synced with each other.
I work at a marketing agency with exclusively charity clients and I can confirm it is indeed statistically significant. The response rates are typically around 1% if just mailed to a targeted group of non-supporters (cold audience in charity marketing parlance) whereas the warm audience (current givers, people on your database) would normally achieve upwards of a 10% response rate. Considering a mailing costs something like $0.15 per piece you can see how, even with relatively small donations, it adds up to big profits.
Have you considered some of the solutions offered by Samaritan Technologies? Here's a link to their site
They're pricy, but they have completely customizable solutions and offer more value per dollar than Raiser's Edge, Common Ground, etc.
We've used several of these other providers, and Samaritan's solutions pretty well blow the others we've used out of the water.
Having some small experience with them, I'm happy thus far. They provide services for mostly government, parks, corporate and disaster relief volunteer management but they say they can adapt their solutions to any situation. We're pretty small potatoes compared to some of their other clients (I've met a few of their clients at expos, I think their larger clients include the USMC and the USO).
I looked at moving FROM Raisers Edge to Common Ground and found it lacking a lot of features. As much as I would like to ditch the God awful expense of Raisers Edge, it really is the best fund raising software on the market. The place where Raisers Edge really shines is the query builder. An average, not very skilled user can be trained to run some seriously complex queries in a day or two. Raisers Edge builds the kind of queries that will have skilled SQL DBAs scratching their heads and saying things like, "I never realized you could do that with SQL." It will construct cursors and arrays and other fairly complex data structures on the fly.
The downside of Raisers Edge is the cost, and the complexity. It is a complex system and Blackbaud seems to go out of their way to make it next to impossible to migrate out of the system. It is also a resource hog. Under normal load it will run fine. As soon as you throw one of the previously mentioned uber queries on it, the poor thing will grind to a halt. The other day we did a 50,000 constituent export on a dual, quad-core Xeon box and it took two and a half hours to finish. The query was complex and involved lots of joins, but stilll...
Raisers Edge is one of those programs that if you haven't gotten used to it, you probably won't know what you're missing. I'd suggest giving Common Ground a shot and if it sucks, you can always step up to the gold standard. If it gets the job done for you, then you save all of the maintenance fees that come with Raisers Edge.
Make sure that you get a GOOD demo of Common Ground though. Realize that the canned reports probably won't get the job done and that you are going to have to write your own. I had a hard time getting clear answers from Common Ground about their reporting interface. Also make sure that you have the opportunity to try to build some custom queries with their interface. The application is only worth while if you can actually get your information back out of it.
Make sure you consider how many users you are going to have on it and what the load will be. Make sure that you consider your bandwidth requirements. Consider the previously mentioned 50,000 constituent export. Can Common Ground even handle that? Will it absolutely bring the system / internet connection to its knees?
Quick question re RE exports on a hosted system:
I've experienced that long export a few times. Must say I was shocked because that is pretty rare for RE. What I'm wondering is whether that would continue to be an issue when using Blackbaud's hosting function?
I second the downer on Giftworks. Tech support is run by first level screeners, there's been so much turnover second level no longer exists. The query function with its SmartLists is junk, you never find what your need. We have our donors subsetted into a half a dozen frequencies ie once a year at Thxgvg, twice a year for a raffle, 5 times a year for a regular donor, a few every month. Whether or not they volunteer, don't want gaming stuff, etc. This level of sophistication is completely out of GW league, or at least of their tech support and trainers.
I liked the Campaign Associates package, cheap, fast, reliable, great for queries and mail mergers. The Raiser's Edge publisher bought it out, not to improve it as an entry level package, but to kill of the competition for RE.
Yes, nonprofit software sucks royally. We're looking at DonorPerfect, mebbe.
I'm so glad our small non-profit doesn't rely on donations for funding. Yeesh.
BTW - I do check the efficacy of your charity before I give.
I think it's a great idea for people to check out their charities carefully before donating. Unfortunately, there are a few wasteful and even corrupt charities out there. However, if you're using charity navigator, make sure you read their fine print: at present they only catalog 4500 charities, only organizations with about $500k private donations each year, only organizations with budgets of $1M+ per year. This is not meant to say anything bad about charity navigator; they are offering a tremendous service that is greatly needed. But when you search for an organization and it's not there, it could be that they're just too small to be on their map.
When I donate, I look for the organizations that seem to get the most work done with the least overhead and who can benefit the most from smaller donations from non-rich people like me. That almost always comes out being the small grassroots organizations that were formed up because individual community members decided to take things in their own hands (mostly because the nat'l orgs or nat'l gov't weren't doing their job). They have very small staff (under 20, often under 5), and budgets that are impossibly tiny to even cover their payroll.
These organizations will never make charity navigator's list. So, like with all tools, make sure you know what charity navigator does and doesn't do. And if you want to really want to change things, donate to groups that are too small to be on that list.
Anyone checked out the Grace Donation Manager (http://code.google.com/p/gracedm/) for this sort of thing?
http://code.google.com/p/gracedm/
I had to create a form letter that says A-E above and send it to a couple charities (yes, I am speaking to you Feeding America!). I will add F. I switched to give everything in December since some were doing the 10-month-year thing like magazines e.g. "time for your renewal in May" when I gave in July last year. grrr
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There is a ton of research to help you decide what to do here. The first place I'd look is Idealware - Here's a link to their Low Cost Donor Management Systems Report: http://idealware.org/reports/consumers-guide-low-cost-donor-management-systems.
It also has a very handy selection process, which you should follow when choosing ANY system of this type. Download the FREE report - it's worth it.
Marc
NTEN (the Non-profit Technology Network folks) did a 2007 CRM satisfaction survey (http://www.nten.org/research/2007_crm) and a 2009 Data Ecosystem survey (http://www.nten.org/blog/2010/02/09/nten-data-ecosystem-report-now-available). CiviCRM was best ranked in the first, and best ranked for orgs 500k in the second, beating out other offerings including Salesforce, Blackbaud, Convio and so on. Well worth the small investment in becoming an NTEN member, but I think the reports are available for purchase to non-members.