Blackbaud eTapestry Erfahrungen

Good management software

Kommentare: We use this as our primary data storage system. It talks to our database view very well.

Vorteile:

I like that all of our data is stored in this software and that it is easy to quickly access for my whole team.

Nachteile:

Sometimes the software gets bogged down with users and runs very slow. The updates do take some getting used to as well.

Blackbaud eTapestry: Well Worth The Purchase - Absolutely Worth Every Dime

Kommentare: Exceptional experience and would recommend to all that are searching for a donor software system.

Vorteile:

Everything about this software is exactly what we need. We can communicate with our supporters in many ways, prepare and run queries on any field, create and use reporting features at any time and essentially document and track all donor information. This is all done with ease and offers flexibility.

Nachteile:

We wish there were a few more features as it integrates with social media and email addresses. We have found that the accuracy is not as strong as we would like it to be.

AVOID eTapestry at ALL Cost! Their set-up, project management and communication is abysmal!

Kommentare: This company lacks effective project management and communication with their clients, especially during the set up of their services. When they fail at communication and project management they blame the client and make you feel as if you are the "client from HELL!" Since I was director of Account Services at two major fundraising agencies, I DO KNOW project management and how to effectively communicate schedules, expectations, project responsibilities and deliverables to clients. They are failing miserably and I did not expect to get this horrible level of service and then made to feel as if I was creating the problem! if you want to abdicate all responsibility in what eTapestry does and get what they give you, you will probably like this company. However, if you are at all knowledgable and want things done in a professional and organized manner having input in how it turns out, don't go with eTapestry. You will be sorely disappointed and face ongoing threats of increased costs.

Vorteile:

On the surface, the features are hard to beat. Their reputation through Blackbaud would lead you to believe they are a top notch organization. Their sales efforts and people are really good...attentive and always available.

Nachteile:

This company is resting on a PAST reputation and on the coat tails of Blackbaud. As a previous Director of Account Services at two major fundraising agencies serving domestic and international nonprofits, I felt I had selected the best company for my nonprofit's fundraising soluction. BIG mistake! They know NOTHING of project management in the set up of a new client. They don't provide a schedule of deliverables and who provides what when. They do not do wire frames on their website or eCommerce forms so you don't know what you are getting. At every turn they tell you they will charge you more if you change anything. They start NOTHING until they have EVERYTHING they want but give the client NOTHING to see what we will be getting from them. THEN they take 6 weeks and don't tell you a date when anything will be delivered. When you get it, you can be completely surprised because you have no idea of what they will be delivering because they did no layouts to have you approve.

very versitile

Kommentare: We have been able to move towards a more technology based fundraising using the justgiving portion of blackbaud for our jog-a-thon. Students created their own page and shared it for donations. This made tracking and acknowledging donations much more efficient.

Vorteile:

We use etapestry and justgiving and have found it to be very useful. We have been able to easily link fundraising campaigns, event registration and forms to our website and then track information.

Nachteile:

Extracting information can be somewhat challenging - once you learn their programing and how to create a query it becomes easier. They do provide a very large training database and a chat room for help.

New to eTap, not to CRM

Kommentare: Creating an all in one database for donors and subscribers is very important as we grow. We grew from 1 to five employees overnight and so getting "organized" was essential.

Vorteile:

I love the ease of functionality in finding and creating accounts. I like the connection with Blackbaud Merchant Services for an all in one platform.

Nachteile:

The start-up was a little too long and delayed our business plan. Also, queries and forms are not necessarily intuitive.

Great Tool for Tracking Donors

Kommentare: I really like eTapestry for donor giving and cultivation.

Vorteile:

It was easy to use and track giving and donors over time.

Nachteile:

Grant tracking could be a little easier to navigate.

Great for smaller organizations looking to grow!

Vorteile:

eTapestry is a great entry-level CRM tool that will help you familiarize with how the whole concept works. My organization used eTapestry for quite some time and it functioned really well. I really enjoyed the Query Builder tool and folders to keep all your queries organized!

Nachteile:

Once my organization started to grow more, we needed a tool that could handle the bigger volume.

Too Many Limitations

Kommentare: If you are only dealing with donations, this may be a good option for you, but I work for a membership organization, and not long after I was hired, I convinced the organization to scrap eTapestry for something better suited to our needs.

Vorteile:

This database is easy to use. If you've ever used another donor management system, you'll find it pretty intuitive. You can build decent queries and create tons of data points you want to track.

Nachteile:

Everything has to be done manually, and it can take some time. I wouldn't recommend this to a membership organization because of the time involved logging renewals. There is also a really not so awesome template you have to use create all of the products you want to offer, including donations. It's a hassle for the organization and the donor.

eTapestry Non Profit Review

Kommentare: Very cumbersome and took a long time to learn all the aspects of the software. I still do not feel like we were able to utilize the system to its fullest potential.

Vorteile:

Accessibility and ease of data entry. I also liked the templates that were available for newsletters, emails and etc.

Nachteile:

Creating reports was not user friendly.

We use this software to manage the donors, supporters, volunteers, etc. for our non-profit.

Kommentare: It a good, basic tool for housing all of your client, customer or supporter contact information and activity.

Vorteile:

Its an inexpensive way to manage donor and supporter activities. It also allow us to bulk email and communicate to our audience. We can design a nice email with graphics and it is fairly easy to set it up and send it out.

Nachteile:

It is a little clunky in that the categories and drop-downs aren't customization. You basically have to get with your team (or those responsible for entering data) and decide how to use their established categories to fit the data you want to collect in order to have it be consistent for each person's information that you enter.

Customization is both a pro and con

Vorteile:

Basic tools are easy to learn, especially as a first-time user. Saving attachments to records. Tracking soft credits; linking soft credits to hard credits. Ability to process credit cards and post directly in data records.

Nachteile:

Many past development staff led to variations of historical data inputs--this is where the customization makes tasks difficult. Queries can only do AND and OR, so it can take multiple queries to get to the data needed. Can't delete accounts once a profile has been created. Can't undo merged accounts. Can't pull direct report on numbers of donor visits, donor gifts, etc (donor-focused data). Can't designate a special location for detailed donor visit reports (eTap account "Notes" isn't efficient).

Hard to use but has all the bells and whistles

Kommentare: We liked the software for a while but the more our business grew, the more eTapestry because a pain as the interface was very old and hard to use for people that aren't technology savvy.

Vorteile:

The software had a lot going for it because it had all the bells and whistles that you want, including ability to find out someones net worth, donations at other places, etc. The plus side about it was that you could easily put someone into the system and instantly send them a thank you email without more than a few clicks.

Nachteile:

It was very difficult to run reports as there were so many moving parts to get them to come together.

e-Tapestry: Non-Profit Software for 10,000 or less donors

Kommentare: When I worked for a small non-profit we used e-Tapestry successfully. It was a tremendously helpful to establishing our development pyramid and where our team should best spend our time to be successful.

Vorteile:

This software allows you to track, research and analyze donors. That means you can project revenue, cultivate more effectively and have a better communicative relationship with your donors.

Nachteile:

In non-profit, development professionals use many different types of software. I see eTapestry as the entry level software with an eventual graduation to Raiser's Edge.

Not recommended for small non-profits

Vorteile:

eTapestry is probably suited for larger organizations and is much more than we need. There are a ton of reports available and it's easy to keep track of different campaigns. It also has excellent tools for event management, like tracking ticket sales, sending invites, etc.

Nachteile:

I found the program a bit overwhelming to use as a new fundraiser who also worked by myself. If I had a team, or someone to train me it may have been a bit easier. It is not very intuitive. Also, the training videos are not included, which is a big negative since the program is so expensive to begin with. I did not find this program very simple for receipting donations as they came in with monthly receipts as well as year-end receipts. It was a tedious process. The customer support team was not very helpful. We ended up going in a different direction with our business.

Over-complex and user unfriendly

Kommentare: As a 10+ year Raiser's Edge user, I wasn't too worried about using eTapestry as part of my new job. Boy, was I wrong.
I inherited the system and was unpleasantly surprised to find that this Blackbaud product so user unfriendly.
Even the most basic functions are not intuitive. It take more steps than are necessary to extract the information you need which means it's time consuming and therefore hampers productivity. For example, running a query shouldn't frustrate the user to the point that they have to resort to letting Blackbaud support login to the system and run it!
Additionally, this platform doesn't have a mechanism to capture detailed notes about donors - something that is critical in fundraising!
If I were using Raiser's, I would be able to go into a donor record, open the notes field and record the gist of a conversation, meeting, etc. as well as set follow ups. In eTapestry, you're limited to a sticky note which isn't exactly the same thing -- in fact, it's nothing like it. If you just want to keep simple data -- basically a place to record gifts, then this *might* work for you. However, you need to understand that this isn't an easy interface; most functions take multiple (and I mean double-digit multiple) steps to complete. There are other donor management programs out there that offer much more in a easier to use format ... typically for the same price.

Vorteile:

I cannot think of a single thing.

Nachteile:

Everything.

eTapestry - is it for you, without a rep?

Kommentare: I can recommend - you have to decide and you management without a Lindsey

Vorteile:

I like eTapestry but I have to confess that when I started at an organization using it I had the benefit of an assistant who knew the product inside and out and got me started almost immediately actively working with the software. It is intuitive so I only had to query my wonderful colleague, on occasion. I was excited at what was possible to accomplish (with some add-ons).

Nachteile:

Again the confession: if I did not have rep on board would I have been able to be operating the system my first week. I had used similar products before and am not really a novice. I did reach out during that time to eTapestry for support but it was often slow enough that I figured everything out without their help

The best for smaller organizations

Vorteile:

Such an easy interface to maneuver. It makes managing donors and tracking gifts as easy as possible, while maintaining an attractive interface. Customer support is cool because a primary function is for support to be given by other users, people who know the software and may have overcome struggles like you are enduring. It creates a community in the nonprofit sector.

Nachteile:

It might be too simple for larger organizations, but it's functionality is just as applicable for larger groups as it would be for smaller! Customer support will get you through any hassle.

eTapestry is a very useful for successful fundraising

Vorteile:

This software has the capability of reporting on so many things. From donor retention to volunteer hours, you can set up your own fields and track what is important to your organization.

Nachteile:

It can be very challenging and tedious to learn how to queries and reports work. There are so many criteria that have to be set correctly to gather the information you need.

eTapestry Likely Good for Larger Organizations

Vorteile:

eTapestry has a responsive customer service team. Whenever I had an inquiry, someone was there to answer my questions. Once I was speaking with a sales associate and had a question the associate could not answer. The associate passed my question on to a customer service representative and the rep called me within a day to help solve my problem.

Nachteile:

eTapestry has many options for managing large databases. This is wonderful for large organizations, however, ours is a small non-profit. We have two fundraisers and fewer than 1000 prospect records. eTapestry was too complicated for our needs and therefore ended up only being useful for data storage. Another issue arose when we had staff turnover. Product knowledge left with former staff and training for eTapestry would have cost 150% more than our annual eTapestry costs. Training was just too expensive and, as a result, we did not utilize eTapestry as much as we could have.

I love eTapestry!

Kommentare: eTapestry is a great product for start ups and smaller non-profits. Going to the training is very helpful for getting the big picture for functionality, however, the online training options are so helpful that if you can't go to the live training, you still have everything you need at your fingertips.

Vorteile:

I love the ease of use. I love the DIY forms that integrate with our website. I love the user-defined fields so we can track anything we want. I love how easy it is to do a query, and I love the flexibility of the reports.

Nachteile:

I do see that eTapestry doesn't have the full functionality that the Raiser's Edge has, however, they are minor issues, and easy enough to work around.

Wish it wasn't so difficult.

Kommentare: Someone needs to reprogram eTapestry to be more user friendly to those who do not have computer programming history.

Vorteile:

It is so nice to have all of your contacts in one place, and all of their donation history saved.

Nachteile:

Reports/queries are difficult - when you only run them once or twice a year it's impossible to remember

eTapestry works for us!!!

Vorteile:

Easy to get started, holds all our historical data, functional for our entire team. Adding additional search tags is a snap

Nachteile:

Wish queries were easier to configure. Want a functional mobile version for "on-the-go" access. Need better family/business reporting

Seems cumbersome.

Vorteile:

It seems to have a lot of features, although our organization only uses a fraction of those. The Cart would be a good feature if we could get it to work.

Nachteile:

The query/report functionality seems very cumbersome. Also, many programs these days integrate directly with QuickBooks, although eTapestry does not, unless I'm missing something. The download into QuickBooks does not import the detail, so I have to keep going back to eTapestry when I need the detail. The pricing seems high for an organization of our size. I don't find the program intuitively easy to use -- the buttons are never where I think they will be, and the "Help" section has not been very helpful. The program does not seem flexible: Just an example -- I set up an approach that I realized shortly after that I wouldn't need, and your instructions said that I couldn't delete it. Although I could disable it, I don't want it forever after lurking in the data base when it has never been used and never will be!

eTapestry

Vorteile:

They have the best CRM customer service ever. Starting out, most CRMs just make you learn their software on your own. I had a rep actually walk me through everything and set stuff up for me when I wasn't able to figure it out myself. Talk about above and beyond.

Nachteile:

We need a file upload option on our DIY forms and this CRM doesn't have that capability so it's really inconvenient.

Exceptional product for growth and retention of members and donors.

Vorteile:

There are too many wonderful things to list them all, and each organization will find ways to make it their own. Some of the things I like: you don't have to be a computer wiz; eTapestry provides a series of training videos, online support, and phone support to help you make the most of the program and keep in constant contact. eTapestry makes reaching out to your target audience fast and easy. Without it, our organization would have to hire another employee just to do mailings, emails, data entry, etc. Being a non-profit, we don't have the budget for more employees or multiple programs to meet our daily operational need . We have it linked to our website, allowing guests to make online purchases, sign up for emails, and volunteer for events. The information they provide, automatically gets set up in eTapestry, and we are notified that we have had online activity. Financial information can be sent directly to accounting software. We are always learning more ways to make eTapestry work for us.

Nachteile:

I would like to see some newer templates for emails, cart, etc.