Comments on: Any Color You Want … As Long As It’s Black

By: Loren

Loren — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:53:12 +0000

I was the VP of Development for four years at an organization that used Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge and Net Community (for online donations and events) and while customer support for RE was consistent and responsive the support for our online product was horrible. They kept trying to push us to switch to their new product which I think was called Sphere, which by all accounts was horrible and they didn’t seem to care about the issues we were having. I can’t imagine them handling the take over of Convio and the customer service and attention that additional clients will need along with their “old” customers. Thanksfully, as you pointed out, there are alternatives out there if organizations get fed up. Unfortunately, when you are running events year-round and RE is your donation database of record it is very hard to swtich to other online software that doesn’t interact well with the main database. All of these businesses promise that you can download data from an online product to your main database, but it never works well or is as easy as they claim unless you are willing to create a new IT position to facilitate the process. I feel sorry for all of the current Convio, Kintera, Net Community and Sphere users out there. You have my condolences.

By: Jay Love

Jay Love — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:35:44 +0000

Well done story and opinion by our friends at The Agitator! Although I believe the real essence will be in the comments made by others, especially customers. Ultimately it is the customer who like in HBO’s Game of Thrones votes thumbs up or down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW6wfXPeJTw&feature=related

By: John Sauvé-Rodd

John Sauvé-Rodd — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:37:19 +0000

Can the leopard change its spots? I’ve been an NFP software watcher for over twenty years. During that time Blackbaud has, in my territory of the UK, consistently moved in on promising fundraising software competitors and bought them out, closed them down and replaced their products, often excellent products, with their own, and this despite promises to the contrary. The reduction in software diversity is not welcomed. It is part of a common issue with Blackbaud in the UK: ‘We quite like the software (Raiser’s Edge), but hate the company’.
Back then, as now, there have been many alternatives to the big software vendors. When the world was young, my best beloved, there was shareware for the smaller NFPs and then the great promise of open source (a great white elephant that failed) and now there are the successors to them at the low end of the market.
These alternative solutions cannot, in general, sustain the larger and more sophisticated NFP organisation’s fundraising and marketing. They suffer with the same malaise as of old: insufficient capital for development, a market that cannot or will not pay a fair price, and excesses of zeal but a dearth of business skills.
Against this twenty year view there are the puzzling questions about Blackbaud’s failure to innovate. For example, they’ve conspicuously stumbled with analytical cubes (The Information Edge) but bought Target Analytics whose tools were breathtaking, but I see no best-of-breed analysis tool in the Blackbaud product rangenow; so where is the common growth here? I don’t see it.
So I don’t share Roger’s optimism. Kipling’s story of the leopard and his spots was one of the ‘Just So’ stories. It is just so with Blackbaud, believe me.

By: claire axelrad

claire axelrad — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:35:45 +0000

This is a great perspective, and really helpful information about the alternatives out there (especially for smaller nonprofits). Thanks so much!