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?"

Comments

Similiar situation

[dave562]

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?

Re:Similiar situation

[metrometro]

We use Salesforce.com (since rebranded as Common Ground), and I can answer most of these queries -- on tech backbone, it's the best you're going to get. It's all done in the cloud, and it's fairly robust commercial grade stuff. Exporting 50,000 records is just a question of downloading the CSV. If it's a really big job, they schedule it and ship it in an hour or so. Given that most NPOs can't or don't want to invest in their own hardware, putting it in the cloud is a really good idea. Likewise with data security concerns -- Salesforce.com is much better than leaving it to the typical NPO tech guy.

J

Re:Similiar situation

[Vidar Leathershod]

Take a look at inResonance's "Generations". It's an open database system which compares very favorably to The Raiser's Edge. The company that produces it is also much nicer to work with than Blackbaud (the company that tried to blame a bug of theirs on a user's mouse, I kid you not).

When Blackbaud was acquiring the admissions product used at an institution I worked for, I found inResonance's admission product, which was not only nicer, but much, much cheaper, with excellent support and training. They also handled the data import from soup to nuts. At the time, they were just developing Generations (this was 11 years ago). The founder made it a practice to know how the various aspects of admissions/fundraising/etc., worked when developing these products, so they feel very natural to the departments that use them.

Luckily, having now been in the "for profit" business for quite some time for myself, I no longer have need of these things :).

Small to Mid-sized Options

[rueger]

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.)

check out CiviCRM

[daemonc]

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:

• Salesforce, while certainly powerful and flexible, is really designed with business users in mind, which leads to some ugly hacks when it comes to some basic things that non-profits need
• For the features we were interested in, CiviCRM was on par with Raiser's Edge
• CiviCRM came out ahead in online donation processing, ability to create custom web forms, and ease of use
• CiviCRM is tightly integrated with the Drupal content management system, which we were already using for several websites
• CiviCRM is Open Source, free of charge, and has great community and commercial support

Do yourself a favor, and give it a look.

Re:check out CiviCRM

[Anonymous Coward]

You should also take a look at the latest 3.2 release of CiviCRM (currently in alpha), which has significant usability and performance enhancements.

Re:heh

[ThePortlyPenguin]

I tried SugarCRM. It can do the job, but for non-profits it is a rough fit because the verbage isn't what the users are expecting. Right functionality, wrong language.

Re:As a volunteer, what I would like from donors.

[ThePortlyPenguin]

CiviCRM is smart enough to catch the obvious double-entries and prompt, "Hey, there's this dude over here with a similar name and address already. Do you want to create a brand new record, or just merge changes with the existing one?"