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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?
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?
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
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.
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 don't think very small non-profits need much of a CRM to store their contacts. You can get a lot of mileage out of a cheap web host, Gmail and a spreadsheet.
The thing with non-profits, at least from what I've observed, is they eventually reach a tipping point where the management overhead starts growing out of proportion. You find yourself needing to hire more people, these ones are untrained and certainly not as devoted as the founders, they whine and moan about any repetitive work, so you compensate by upgrading your tech. That's where something like these commercial CRMs might start making sense; your options are :
1. pay a contractor to build it = expensive and poor support
2. hire a junior to build it = crap code and NO support when the kid leaves you for a better job halfway through the project
3. buy an off-the-shelf product that already satisfies a large portion of your needs, comes with documentation and even in-person training, and has has a support hotline for when you need it
People tend to think of non-profits as these angelic organisations that don't make money. Non-profit is just a different business model: same game, alternate rules. Just because you don't turn a profit doesn't mean everyone involved is broke. With all the tax breaks, subsidies and sponsors, even though the company itself doesn't make a profit, you can create a bunch of cushy jobs for everyone. I found a tiny bit of information at http://www.nonprofitstaffing.com/Salary-Surveys-(1).aspx . Obviously the laws vary widely, but for the most part, non-profits are just business with no real stakeholders.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
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!
Yeah, the money's why I took an 80% pay cut to work for a 501(c)3. And am loving it!
I agree with #3, though, as long as you include LAMP/Drupal/CiviCRM as a "off-the-shelf" product.
Civi's query builder is pretty smooth, as long as you are trying to do ANDs. It will only do relatively simple ORs. But it's got a simple, a complex, and a "Hey, I want to write the SQL myself" mode.
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.