Some specific pain points:

1) Inconsistent data model for gifts: Gifts are treated differently if they are entered through an "event" (online donation page) vs manually through the GUI. Why? This has broad-reaching consequences, but to shorten up this posting, it makes it very hard to manage gifts. And this system is ABOUT gifts.

2) Designed for the inept: More than one Blackbaud support rep has told me (paraphrasing) "The GUI ~used~ to let you do that, but we took that feature away because people kept messing up their data." e.g., deleting a donation or pledge, or changing the campaign on a gift entered online, or associating a gift to a pledge if the pledge was created after the gift. The interface is designed for people who can't be trusted to manage their own data in the first place, and there is no facility to allow competent people to work freely.

3) CMS Lockdown: No support for server-side pages. Limited native support for customizing forms.

4) Bugs treated as product enhancements: I recently found two cases where split gifts do not roll up consistently between the ad hoc query tool and the default gift view. The response was, "we'll consider it for a future release." This is a bug, not a feature enhancement.

5) Slow: Updating records through the GUI is slow, and the replication of those records to the reporting database is slow. As someone who has worked on VLDB systems, I sense that the databases are not properly partitioned between clients. It is especially suspicious that all clients must share the same username identifiers – for SAAS, this is not good segregation. It's like having your hosting service tell you, "sorry, your web page will have to be renamed because another client already created a page with the same name." Really.

I would rather extract all the data from this system and start over with a new vendor than try to make this system work given the current constraints. That said, my org can't afford to, so I'm stuck.

That said, I have found the support group to be helpful and accessible. I feel like our account manager wants to do right by us and is trying to advocate for us. I have a long list of issues (too long to go into here) submitted to Blackbaud support, and if I make headway I will post back here to give an update.

https://listserver.itd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=discuss-kintera

A question for Anonymous who posted on 2/9/07, if he makes it back here… What are you using for a daily synch? Did you purchase the service from Kintera?

As far as I can come up with that would be the only way to do it since they’re hosting my data and export functionality is so limited. For the life of me, I can’t do it through the front-end.

I’m finding myself with more requests for info from people I work with, so anyone who is/was a client w/ more feedback – please tell me if this is true. I don’t want to steer someone that way only to see them lose support or lose their entire investment if this company makes more cuts.

The first is that your RE data synch works fine with Kintera. We have had a daily synch for the last year and a half, without any problem.

The second is that I have found Kintera to have excellent Support. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it.