I will say the online component is lacking. They have made some improvements including allowing you to sell tickets to pre registered programs. Our online sales volume is not significant yet, so we use a local cheap vendor that allows us to customize forms and create as many as we need. I think that blackbaud needs to work on their online component in all products.

I can report, however, that altru has come along way since when we first looked at it. We can do discounts and membership benefits. The reporting is pretty awesome and I love how we are being asked to participate in discovery sessions for new improvements.

We moved from the raiser's edge so we did lose some functionality like proposals and action tracks. I do also miss the ability to do custom reporting via crystal report.

I have lots more details for anyone interested.

LowCountry,

Thanks for your detailed response. This is the first substantive discussion this thread has gotten.

cheers,

mkav

Hi Claudia,

I am curious when you implemented Altru did you run into any additional costs beyond the price of the one year contract with Blackbaud? Did you need to do any custom programming to get Altru dialed in for your organization or was the conversion seemless?

What ticketing system were you using before you converted to Altru?

cheers,

Mkav

We paid to have them convert our store data. The only other costs were the travel expensives for the trainer and the go live person. We have not needed custom programming. The conversion from Raiser's edge was almost seamless. There a few things that were different but we super checked our data so it was mostly clean.

We were using CAM.

Hi Claudia,

I was talking to our Development Director here at our museum. She wanted to ask what the general feeling was of the "Development Department" was to the switch from RE to Altru?

Do they feel they lost functionality or are they happy with Altru and it current set RM features?

cheers,

Mike

Oops I meant to say CRM (customer relationship management) functionality of Altru vs RaisersEdge.