Ask Idealware: Blackbaud, or eCommerce Tools fo Online Donations?

Sue asks: We purchased Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge last year. People here love it, but most of our donations come through the mail. Only 46 online donations since Sept. 07, so I’m wondering if it makes sense to purchase their online donation module, which is quite expensive, or to do something less expensive. We are planning to use Monster Commerce (now owned by Network Solutions) for our new online store, and may just try to make that work for donations, too. I’m not sure how flexible it is, though. We’ve been using the Bizland shopping cart for both sales and donations, which makes donors feel like they are purchasing something when they make a donation, and we would like to improve that interface.

Laura Quinn of Idealware says:
The key issue here is integration - how important is it to you that your donations flow smoothly into Raisers Edge from your online donation module, without any manual work for your staff? At your volume - 5-10 donations per month - getting the data into Raiser Edge doesn't feel like enough of an effort to pay substantially more for Blackbaud's online transactions module. While this tool, called NetCommunity, offers some nice integrated features - for instance, the ability to change the giving levels on an online donation form based on a user's giving history - it doesn't seem like you're at a scale that it makes sense to pay a lot more for these advanced features. There are a number of tools that provide nice support for online donations for the realm of $20/month plus 3% per transaction - see our Online Donation report (it's quite old, but the list of tools is still reasonably useful)

You should be able to export the data from any online donation tool, to be able to import it into Raisers Edge every week, or at whatever frequency makes sense for you. Even manually entering the data seems like a reasonable process for your volume, although this becomes more error prone. Of course, you should think about the future as well - are you likely to continue getting donations at about the same pace, or is the number likely to increase over time to a volume that's less easily manageable with manual processes?

In regard to Monster Commerce, while it can be tempting to try to consolidate an online store and online donation options, my experience is that it's difficult to provide substantial support for both with a single tool. If you sell more than a handful of items, a real eCommerce tool is warranted - these provide a shopping cart model, tools to update pictures and prices, and support for shipping fees and sales tax. These more sophisticated tools generally are built for the business world, and have trouble supporting donations in a way that doesn't involve "checking out" and sometimes even "shipping" the donation. You might check out Click & Pledge - they have robust support for donations, and a shopping cart model for items, and might provide enough functionality for your needs. Or see our article A Few Good Payment Multitaskers for a number of different options that might you kind of get you there in a single package.

Or do any of our intrepid readers have suggestions for tools that will support both sophisticated eCommerce - a shopping cart and things like shipping fee rules for a store with a substantial number of items - as well as solid donation pages and processes?

Update 4/10: Ack! As David mentions below, and several people have emailed me, Blackbaud's NetCommunity is the wrong product for Sue's needs - their NetSolutions would be much more fitting. (I knew I should have sent this question to someone who works more extensively with Blackbaud products... I apologize for the misinformation. I assure you that our articles are better researched!) Could anyone give us a ballpark sense of what Sue would expect to pay for NetSolutions? At a lower price point than NetCommunity, it might be sensible to pay a little more for a solution which doesn't require staff time to get the donation data into Raiser's Edge.

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