Ideas

From Raiser’s Edge to CiviCRM: A Case Study

This case study was written by Eliet Henderson, the Development Director at San Francisco Baykeeper, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting San Francisco Bay from pollution. Baykeeper has an annual budget of $750,000 and eight staff members, two of which handle outreach, communications and fundraising. Eliet manages outreach, online communications, publications and events.

In 2010, San Francisco Baykeeper was suffering from disparate fundraising and communication systems. We were using:

• Blackbaud Raiser's Edge as an offline donor database, which cost $2,500 annually.
• Email Now from Network for Good for mass email, at a cost of $30 a month.
• A custom database to collect online donations. The online donation pages couldn’t be customized without outside programming expertise, so they largely remained static.
• The same system for ticket sales to one or two major donor events a year. We paid about $1,000 per event to customize the ticket sale page.
• Various third-party vendors to host personal fundraising pages, which cost about $1,000 in processing fees per recreational fundraising events, which we held twice a year.

With no integration among these systems, we spent a lot of staff time manually entering donations into Raiser’s Edge and transferring data from Raiser’s Edge to Email Now. Without the functionality to customize online donation pages, we couldn’t conduct effective online fundraising. We also were spending a lot of money on event registration pages.

Further, because there was no integration between the contact database and the email database, we couldn’t track donors’ email activity, nor could we do email fundraising. We had no way to segment email communications based on giving history – such as differentiating between donors and non-donors – so we had no ability to, for instance, run a campaign to convert new email subscribers into donors. Meanwhile we were forced to try to cultivate our existing online donors through physical mailings, which is both costly and not very effective.

Baykeeper needed:

• Online gift processing that automatically updated the donor database (and offered recurring donation functionality);
• Customizable online giving pages;
• Customizable online pages for event registration & ticket sales;
• An email tool that integrated with donor records; and
• Personal fundraising pages for recreational events and for Board members.

And of course, we wanted to maintain much of the functionality offered by the Raiser’s Edge donor database. I began exploring various systems to meet these needs. This included Raiser’s Edge online modules, SalesForce, Democracy in Action and CiviCRM.

SalesForce, while it offers a nonprofit module, is primarily a private industry marketing tool that is not very customized to nonprofit needs.

DIA targets more advocacy-oriented work – their take-action tools are powerful, but the donor records were not as customizable as we needed.

The Raiser’s Edge extension modules for online outreach and fundraising had one big advantage in that they would not require us to transition to a new database, but the modules offered widely varying levels of integration with our existing Raiser’s Edge database – from very integrated to barely so.

CiviCRM offered many of the features we were looking for, though with some reduced functionality in searching and reporting as compared to Raiser’s Edge.

Costs were a major determining factor when it came to choosing between adopting the Raiser’s Edge extension modules or converting to CiviCRM. I estimated the upfront conversion costs to be roughly the same – about $8,000 – while the ongoing costs were very different: with CiviCRM, $4,000 per year to cover ongoing developer support and website & database hosting, versus $7,000 per year for Raiser’s Edge subscription costs.

The transaction fees were also higher: Paypal Pro with recurring contributions, at our current online income levels, would cost $1,600 a year, while Raiser’s Edge would cost $3,600 a year. This was of particular concern because Baykeeper, like many nonprofits, is working to expand our pool of online donors, particularly through recreational events with the potential to raise tens of thousands of dollars online. High transaction fees would significantly change the profitability of our online fundraising.

Ultimately we felt that it was not financially responsible to commit to paying for a more expensive service when another viable option was available, and we decided to convert to CiviCRM. Baykeeper contracted with Dharmatech to convert our massive quantity of data from Raiser’s Edge to CiviCRM. This turned out to be a much more complicated and time-consuming process than originally estimated: Baykeeper spent $10,000 in database development and Dharmatech contributed an additional $3,500 of their time as an in-kind donation, making the total cost of the conversion $13,500.

Baykeeper has now been using CiviCRM for about six months. Our ongoing costs are still estimated to be about $4,000 per year, including virtual private server hosting for the database and website; CiviSMTP services to manage email sending and bounces; and ongoing developer support. This does not include the cost of sponsoring any new features.

Switching to CiviCRM has had its pros and cons.

The disadvantages have been:

• A difficult import process that required many hours to convert a huge amount and breadth of data from Raiser’s Edge to CiviCRM – about 40 CSV files and 42,000 columns of data for 23,000 records (link to technical blog post). Raiser’s Edge offers many built-in data fields that had to be custom-built in CiviCRM (examples include mailing packages and customizable addressee types, like “invitation addressee”). We had a lot of trouble with converting Raiser’s Edge bi-directional relationships into Civi, and we had to create new ways of storing data for things like contributions paid by a third party.
• Staff time required to learn dramatically different methods of searching and reporting on data, many of which are far more limited and difficult to use than the search and report functionality offered by Raiser’s Edge (such as not being able to include different types of data fields – e.g. contributions and activities – in search results; and no First, Last or Largest Gift search and report functions).
• Having to work with an external developer to set up reports we consider necessary for basic donor management, such as exporting a mailing list with the location type and a report that combines different data types (e.g. mailing addresses and contribution data).
• Creating and implementing new gift processing procedures in special situations for which Raiser’s Edge has built-in functionality, including employer matching gifts; third-party payments (in which a donor’s pledge is paid by a third party like a donor fund); and gifts that are soft credited to more than one constituent.
• Not being able to make advanced customizations of CiviCRM web pages without programming skills. Some examples include displaying a constituents’ addressee & salutation fields when they are updating contact information, or displaying different response options to a question used on two different event registration pages.
• Staff time spent developing online systems & workflows that previously were automated by outside services, such as building online donation pages and managing email subscription lists.
• Encountering and dealing with bugs. CiviCRM is a work in progress.

The advantage of the transition is that Baykeeper now has:

• Customizable online donation pages.
• Customizable online event registration and ticket sales pages.
• Reduced staff time for data entry of online gifts.
• Hosted personal fundraising pages.
• Personalized email links that populate forms so email subscribers don’t have to log in or refill existing information – this is helpful for collecting contact info updates & crucial for increasing online donations.
• An integrated email tool that allows us to monitor donor email activity and conduct targeted fundraising and outreach to our email subscribers.
• Thanks to the CiviCRM/Webform Integration module, an easy way to track contact submissions to our webforms, including for our Take Action campaigns.
• The potential for conducting member surveys (I haven’t implemented this yet, but CiviCampaign seems promising).

In the coming year, Baykeeper will continue to expand our targeted email outreach in order to increase web visits, take-action participation and online donation income. Additionally we expect to further streamline CiviCRM processes for better optimization of the system. I also hope to dedicate a portion of our budget to sponsoring new database features that will address the limitations we have encountered so far.

Finally, please consider supporting the 20+ years of San Francisco Baykeeper’s work. San Francisco Baykeeper is dedicated to running a lean and efficient organization that puts donations to best possible use. With your help Baykeeper will continue their important work of protecting San Francisco Bay from pollution for the benefit of wildlife, water quality, recreational users and all the communities of the Bay Area.