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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?"
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 wonder what it would take to tweak a FOSS solution to fit this need.
Uh, yeah. Done. The FOSS answer to this is called CiviCRM. Works pretty well, but it's always a question of meeting organization needs to the tech solution -- YMMV. http://civicrm.org/aboutcivicrm
My org (nonprofit, ~1.5M annual budget, data creators) uses Salesforce.com, which is donated to us gratis by the Salesforce Foundation. Saelsforce.com is the shit. Common Ground is just a rebranded version of Salesforce.com, presumably because people in the social sector are opposed to both sales and force.
http://yergler.net/blog/2010/04/22/civicon-plenary-what-are-we-paying-for/
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.
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?"