As a consultant, I talk about Journeys a lot! There’s a curve that I describe during a CRM journey that users go through, it’s proper name is an inverse bell curve. Users are really excited once they buy a system, then they have the challenges of talking through their existing data and their enthusiasm drops a bit. They then enter testing and it drops a bit more, but then they see the potential of the new system and begin to get excited again and finally go live day happens and they are nearly as excited to get started as they were when they purchased a system, well at least, that’s how I hope my projects go when I do them.
Now onto the Blackbaud journey, before I go any further, I should state that I have worked with Blackbaud Europe over my time as a consultant and I’ve used Raiser’s Edge since even before I started in the sector in 2005. I am definitely not in the inner circle of what’s happening at Blackbaud so this post is probably not going to tell you anything that you don’t already know if you are on the inside.
Blackbaud have done some things since “The data leak” that I’ve found very disheartening to customers. First there was the charges for using gifts, whilst this was a modest charge, I didn’t understand why if you stored financial information in a system you had to pay extra. Then they announced and will soon remove the Crystal Reports functionality. This is an external tool that Blackbaud provided that allowed you to create your own custom reports and surface that within your Blackbaud product. Finally, there is the removal of the Microsoft Office integration with Raiser’s Edge, I’m not sure if this affects their plethora of other products but this is a massive change for charities. The announcement for this change was just before Christmas, some of the busiest times in the sector across the world not just here in the UK.
Blackbaud are citing a security risk, which again, bearing in mind “The data leak” I can understand that they need to do something, but removing what I think is key functionality of a CRM – normally one of the top 5 requirements of any CRM is being able to write to a supporter, with no replacement other than using microsoft word outside of the system feels short sighted.
Bill Connors, one of the god fathers of Raiser’s Edge, wrote what I thought was a very measured post and more importantly really helpful: https://billconnors.com/msinhosting/ about the challenge that this provides to their clients, it’s definitely worth a read if you’re not sure what you need to do and with just a month left, I’d try and start planning and doing now!
As I look to the future, I’m one of those people who is still deeply frustrated with Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge product, there’s still key things missing from the web view like Volunteering and Membership, some of the stuff in web view is challenging to add or amend eg: Organisation Type (Org2) and as mentioned there are beginning to be some gaps in what users need or expect from a CRM system so it’s getting harder to promote the virtues of RE.
That said, they do have an API which may help in some of these limitations and their strategic business partnership with Microsoft is not going anywhere soon as far as I can tell. So we invested time looking at the API for creating a suite of reports using Power BI and the RE API.
The other thing that they will allow you to do is download a full SQL backup of your data once a month for free. Again this is useful and we’ve used The full backup for training and a deeper reporting suite
More about the reporting suites that we’ve been building in a future post
So finally, as I move forward with CRM systems, all I can suggest is like, Bill Connors has said, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, the Microsoft thing might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, It was definitely something that I was annoyed by for a while! Take a strategic long term view of what’s best for your organisation and more importantly what’s best for your supporters.
A new CRM system is not a cheap process to go through and not just in terms of costs. If you do decide that now is the right time, there are other posts on this blog that I’ve written that may help you along your journey.