Blackbaud eTapestry Reviews & Product Details

I am really trying to push myself to think of positives... I was always able to log in when I needed to, so that's something. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is one of if not the most frustrating pieces of software I have ever used. It is outdated and unnecessarily complicated to use, absolutely horrendous customer service, outrageously expensive.

You have to pay for customer service. I am not kidding. I have had multiple issues, and when I try to call for assistance I am literally told that I do not "qualify" for phone support and must use the chat feature. I also don't have access to the chat features, and it has now been more than a week and their "engineering team" is still trying to figure out why I can't access that chat. I was only able to get any support because I finally called their sales line and spoke to a sales rep.

The functionality of this program is ancient. It's horribly inefficient, not user-friendly or intuitive, and full of redundancies. Running reports is an absolute nightmare, requiring an entire week of training videos to even begin to understand how to do anything useful. It's impossible to even run a basic custom report wihtout hours of research/reading, and that's not an exaggeration. It's impossible. The existing "template" reports might be useful to some organizations, but most of them were worthless for ours. There's also multiple ways to do 1 thing, but if you mix them up you won't be able to pull an accurate report. For example, you can log an in-kind donation by doing A, B, or C, but if you do one donation way A and another way C, then your report will only show one or the other. This means organizations with more than 1 user have to create entirely separate trianing documents or policies in order to have consistent data and useable reports. Just create one standardized way to do the thing that needs to be done.

It takes months if not years to acutally learn how to use this software correctly, and that's assuming you have hours and hours each week to dedicate to learning this software. And, you are REQUIRED to pay for "Blackbaud University" or whatever they call it now as part of your contract (which is $1,000+), but I've found it's easier and faster to just Google the problem and find the fix from someone else's blog or YouTube videos.

And on top of all of this - this is EXPENSIVE. Thousands of dollars for the service (at the low end of the scale, even), REQUIRED additional fees for payment processing even if you don't take payments through Blackbaud/eTap, REQUIRED additional fees for the "education" portal, locked into a 3-year contract to get "lower rater increases." And with all that, you'll still "not qualify" for phone support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Blackbaud eTapestry is the worst CRM for a small nonprofit I have worked with directly. There is no area where it stands out in a positive way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Service for eTapestry is abysmla, the interface is hard to use and not at all intuitive, they continue to underinvest in modernizing the product, and the pricing is obscene.

Worst of all, when we informed them that we would be moving to a new provider when our renewal came up, they came after us and claimed that we had "agreed to" a 3-year contract. This assertion was based on them emailing a departed employee (who had an auto-reply up) 1 year after they left and claiming that a lack of response locked us into a 3-year term with 7% increase rates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. I disliked everything about the platform, the reporting, customer service, email engagement. I can't believe people actually enjoy this tool, especially not small nonprofits. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I disliked everything about the platform, the reporting, customer service, email engagement. I can't believe people actually enjoy this tool, especially not small nonprofits. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My executive director seemed to like the financial reporting on the back end. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Blackbaud ETap was not easy to use and utilized the software benefits. The email marketing was outdated. The customer service was poor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

eTapestry has one really strong quality, and that is its customization and cleanup tools. Its functions for creating custom fields and doing mass updates, imports, and cleanups are really strong. There is a lot of room to find and modify data in batches using the mass update and import tools, and fields can be created and adjusted across most aspects of the database. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

eTapestry's biggest flaw is its clunky, hard-to-learn reporting system. Queries and reports are separated, meaning you have to create a query and test it before you can apply it to a report. This is NOT user-friendly in the slightest and often results in a lot of back-and-forth between the query and report screens to try and make the two work well together. Combining queries and getting more complicated information, like year-over-year giving, was nearly impossible to do without at least a year of training and practice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The customizability of eTapestry is huge factor in why I like this software. Whether its in organizing goals or arranging reports, this platform allows easy fundraising integration for any nonprofit Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

eTapestry can be daunting and while Blackbaud's problem resolution articles are helpful, a wider database for tips and help would be ideal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

eTapestry is customizable and can store a lot of information about donors. The ability to create custom thank-you letters for donations makes that process easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

eTapestry doesn't work with some browsers. Logging in and setting up an account is unnecessarily frustrating sometimes. Pulling certain information can be difficult and they charge for assistance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The records of donors were highly detailed with opportunity to customize. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to complete reports was challenging and not user friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

hmm, that is difficult. I like the technical people on the phone.....but I wish the software was more intuitive so that I didn't need to call them so much. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the email interface, the query system which required an advanced degree in applied mathematics to create a resport in, the lack of social media integration, the high price compared to the features the software offers, the lack of accurate donor capacity tools as well as contact info management, the donation form is the worst of any I have ever seen and there is only one that has to be used across all campaigns, maybe this is enough for you to get started on for now.....but believe me there is more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The track record and extensive history that Blackbaud / eTapestry has had in the data tracking industry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To me, it seemed that the interface was not user-friendly, and was very "clunky". I found it cumbersome to pull reports, and decipher our own data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.