Potential+Vendors

Potential Vendors and contact information: Your entry + click SAVE in the upper right.

Draft ideas

IR a FMPro solution with mutiple modules

FMPro with another vendor ProofGroup.com this Vendor has an Admissions package ONLY.

Veracross

Individualized dbs for various groups rolled out one at a time ... see Belmont Day School feedback

=SeniorSystems=

Hi Paul, Thank you for your call and your interest in SeniorSystems. As your evaluation progresses, please don’t hesitate to call or email me any time. All my contact information follows below for your reference. And, as we discussed, please note that our corporate hq are located in Marlborough, MA. So, should Tenacre become a client, you would be serviced from that office, about 20 miles away. To help you formulate a useful range of costs, I will summarize here based on what you shared in our telephone conversation. If you need a more precise quote, please let me know. We will need to spend a bit more time understanding your needs and project goals. Products & Services · Admissions System o With/without Enrollment Management, Financial Aid, Online Inquiries/Applications, Online Enrollment/Re-Enrollment · Alumni/Development System o With/without Events Management, Alumni/Development Community of My BackPack (e.g. online giving, online directory, etc.) · Registrar System · My BackPack, Faculty/Staff Community o With/without Daily Grade Book, Student/Parent Community · Database & Licensing o Oracle o Oracle Web Application Server o Citrix (for off-site hosted model)

· Implementation Services

o On-site or Web-based planning & training meetings o Servers, database, and required licenses established at our data center o Data file conversion from your source database --- these services NOT included in range…need more details first · On-Going Support o Software updates/upgrades (usually every 2-4 months) o Unlimited toll-free phone and email + WebEx support, M-F, 8am – 6p

Ballpark Range of Costs · Initial costs (software, database, licensing, implementation services) · Plus 1 year of Annual Support Fee (upgrades, customer support) · $60,000 - $110,000 Example Payment Term (remotely hosted model) · For this example, we’ll use a 4-year term and base it on a middle number total, $85,000 · Set-up Fee due with signed contract = $32,000 · 48 monthly payments of $2,100 · After 48-mo period, Tenacre uses on month-to-month basis. Monthly rates would be recalculated at that time based on the prevailing annual support fees, but you should expect something around $1,600 per month, given the “middle numbers” example

END

=Veracross=

VC vs. Raiser’s Edge Development Review

I would like to say that I am very pleased with our conversion to Veracross. We converted from Raiser's Edge 7 to Veracross in March of 2007. Having used Veracross and ES2 for 9 months now, I can say our conversion has been a success. I found the easiest way to state my likes and dislikes was to list them out with explanations of each.

PROS: • Household Records and Person Records - We no longer have to deal with issues such as being able to query on records who have been coded with an attribute regardless if that person record is the main person on the record or the spouse on the record because now in VC they each have their own record, they are both equally important to our school and they both show as living in one household, which is the household record salutation. We could not add an attribute to the spouse unless they had their own record in Raiser's Edge. There was a feature to add the attribute, but there was no way of querying. • Audit Log - We can now see a log of entries of what user made what change on what date. The biggest plus is that we can see the old value of the field and the new value. • Addressee and Salutations - At first we were hesitant to not be able to have all the addressee/salutations that we want, but then we quickly realized how it can benefit us. It is much cleaner, less clutter and there is less confusion as to how an individual is referred to, how they want to be acknowledged and how they would like to be recognized. • The attention and custom changes made to fit our needs - VC really has been terrific and listening to our needs and adding features or helping us understand how their already built-in features can help us with our needs. I cannot even begin to explain all their efforts and successes on this part. • Donation check box "From Both" - A donation can be added in either person record of the household, yet there are donors who would like their gift to reflect from both and some do not. This feature simplifies this request from our donors a great deal. • Advanced Reporting works well - Advanced reporting lets you search for criteria in a much more simplified way than query. There is always different occasions for when to use Query or when to use Advanced Reporting. Advanced query makes it very easy for the average user to pull criteria. • Query works very well also, it requires the thinking skills you use when you use Query in RE. You have to know what field to pull from, where it is located in the database, and how to combine fields when using 'and' or 'or' operators and parenthesis. • Simplifies many automated features - Such as printing labels, an envelope, printing a letter, printing your everyday thank you letters and receipts, printing pledge cards and phoneathon forms. It has all been much much simpler in VC. • Customer Support - As I mentioned above, VC support is unbelievable. They will flip over backwards for their clients. They are there when we need them and we have been extremely happy with their support. • CT System - Their ticket system for support request works wonderfully. We can specify and organize our school's request in priority order. As a school, we communicate to determine who's request/issue is more important. After all, they are only human and can't juggle multiple requests at the same time. It's good that we can communicate through the CT system to let them know what comes first. • Mail Merges to word and Excel - Any query can be easily exported to Excel. It is a big plus to be familiar with how to create custom reports in Excel, or even just merging from Excel to word because it comes in handy to be able to utilize this feature for many different outputs. • Easier interface, easier to navigate - I find it much easier to navigate through the software in VC. • Query folders and sub-folders - I love the way I can organize my queries in folders and sub-folders. Each user has their own folder.Under my own folder, I have created sub-folders such as reports,mailing lists, balancing, etc. • Quick find in Query - I love to be able to search for a field using the quick find. If there is ever a field you need to query on and cannot remember where it is located in the category drop-down lists, you can use the quick find to type it in and it will search for all fields that contain the value you type in. • On-line capability to work from home or anywhere where there is internet access. This has been a huge plus. We can post gifts from home if we need to. • Maps, the maps that are produced from VC are wonderful and come in very handy. • The way it integrates well with online features such as Admissions • Applications, Summer School Registration and in the future our parent portal. • One database integration throughout the school. When someone updates a record, it is updated across the school. This has eliminated a tremendous amount of work across the school, not to mention our office of advancement in particular. We can also communicate easier with the business office and balancing our numbers as well. • E-mail blasts are extremely easy to create and make. We love this feature. • I no longer have to go to two different places to first query then export, it's all in one. • Pictures in records is really nice to have for all of our students and faculty/staff. CONS:

NOTE: Some of these may pertain only to Kinkaid due to the way we process gifts or handle records. • Certain fields do not update until the overnight-process takes place, for instance; reciprocating relationships in Person Records, formatting of phone numbers, Profile Codes aren't added to the Advanced Reporting list of Profile Codes. • Matching Gifts do not reciprocate back to the donor, it needs to be added manually to both and link to each other. • We cannot soft credit an organization when the hard credit is on the individual's record. (although, I might add, that this feature is being worked on) • Person records are treated very separate from Organization records. There are different search screens to look up a Person than an Organization. Also, giving reports are not always easy to pull and display information for both organizations and person records within one report. Organization Roles are also treated differently when pulling Giving by Role. • You cannot export specific information the way Raiser's Edge does. For instance, if I would like to export only 3 specific Profile Categories for each individual record, I cannot specify 3 profile codes, it exports all profile codes. When our office first went through the conversion I became the go-to person for VC in our office and felt it went rather smoothly. Our users, although not completely trained were able to log in and use the software and find their way around without too many questions. The features they needed and the information they needed was immediately there for them to use right away. The main issue we had to deal with was all of the duplicate records which I find there is no way around unless you can have your data so clean from the start that the merge of information can easily match people from each database across the school. Within a few months, we had each taken our share of dupes to work on and Veracross dealt with the bulk of it all.

Veracross is not as robust as Raiser's Edge and I can see how Raiser's Edge has cleaned out a lot of their glitches to where it makes it a lot nicer to use in that respect. On the other hand, ask Blackbaud to tweak the system to work better for you and you have to go around and get a list of signatures from a certain percentage of their clients in order for them to make a change for your benefit. I knew more about the software than many of their customer support representatives. I could teach them a thing or two. Veracross on the other hand, knows their software like the back of their hand. I have felt VC customer support is much more knowledgeable and can really help and give the attention you need quickly and accurately.

There is still much to learn including for us power users and it takes a lot to keep your calm and cool and have to keep a good attitude through the conversion and even months afterwards. Everyone has to go into it with a positive attitude. There are many who do not like change and they just have to work along with us and learn the new software. I felt our people who feel it is hard to adapt to new sofware went through this conversion rather painlessly. They won't admit it because it is hard for them to, but I personally feel they are doing a lot more with this software than they were doing using Raiser's Edge. Many who never even opened a query before are using the query feature now. Merging their own labels and such. It takes more time to ask the power-user to create the labels than for them to click and print themselves.

There are many examples such as this that has made our conversion worthwhile and we are all pleased with Veracross and what it's done for our school.