Beyond Raiser's Edge: Why Nonprofits Are Choosing FundraiseUp
- Ohana Focus Team
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
By Ohana Focus Team| February 2, 2025 | 18 min read
For many nonprofits, the Raiser's Edge workflow is familiar and comfortable. Staff know exactly which query to run for monthly donor reports. The gift processing routine has been perfected over the years. When board meeting prep rolls around, data gets exported to Excel, formatted into the proper layout, and presentations come together. It works. Organizations have been operating this way for decades.
So when someone suggests that a platform like Fundraise Up will "transform how you manage donors," the natural reaction is often skepticism. After all, Raiser's Edge has worked reliably since 1989. Why change something that isn't broken?
But here's what's actually changed—and it's not the software. It's how donors give.
In 1989, when Raiser's Edge was designed, 95% of donations arrived as checks in the mail. Staff opened envelopes, manually entered gift data, and mailed acknowledgment letters. The database's job was straightforward: store donor records and track giving history. Raiser's Edge was perfectly engineered for that world.
Today, 60% of donations happen online. Donors expect to give with Apple Pay in the time it takes to order coffee. They want immediate confirmation emails. They browse donation pages on their phones while waiting for meetings to start. And increasingly, they notice when a nonprofit's giving experience feels clunky compared to every other transaction in their lives.
Raiser's Edge wasn't built for this world. It's been retrofitted for it—with online giving modules bolted on, web versions added, and integrations customized. But retrofitting 1989 architecture for 2025 donor behavior is like adding a touchscreen to a rotary phone. The fundamental design doesn't match the fundamental need.
Fundraise Up represents something different—not an evolution of legacy database thinking, but a complete reimagining of what donor management means when most giving happens online, when donors expect seamless experiences, and when AI can optimize every interaction in real-time.
The Raiser's Edge Tax
Every nonprofit using Raiser's Edge pays what we call the "legacy platform tax"—the accumulated costs, workarounds, and limitations that come from using software designed for a different era.
Consider what happens when a donor visits your website and clicks "Donate"—with Raiser's Edge, they're typically redirected to a generic Blackbaud-hosted page. The form asks for ten or more pieces of information. There's no Apple Pay option. The mobile experience requires zooming and scrolling. Suggested donation amounts are the same for everyone: $25, $50, $100, $250. If the donor abandons halfway through, no one knows. If they complete the gift, staff manually process it the next business day. About 40-50% of people who start this process never finish it.
Then consider the costs on your end. You're paying for Raiser's Edge licenses—typically $9,000-12,000 annually for a small team. The online giving module adds another $6,000-8,000. Email integration costs $3,000-5,000. Payment processing runs 3.5-4.5% plus thirty cents per transaction. You need consultant support for reports and customizations—another $12,000-18,000 annually. And staff spend 10-15 hours weekly on manual gift processing, data entry, and generating reports.
For a midsize nonprofit processing $500,000 in online donations annually, this typically totals $60,000-75,000 in direct costs, plus $25,000-35,000 in staff time—about $90,000 total.
All to deliver an experience that causes half your donors to abandon before completing their gift.
This is the Raiser's Edge tax. Not because Blackbaud is malicious or because the software doesn't work—it does what it was designed to do. But that's the problem—it was designed to manage donors in 1989. And every year you continue using it, you're paying for that historical mismatch between the tool and the task.
The Online Giving Problem
The most visible manifestation of the Raiser's Edge tax is the online giving experience.
A development director at a regional arts council described it this way: "We'd promote our annual campaign with beautiful emails, compelling stories, professional design. Donors would click through excited to give—and land on this generic Blackbaud form that looked like it was from 2005. The disconnect was jarring. We'd watch donation traffic in Google Analytics and see 60% of people abandoning on the donation page. We knew we were losing gifts, but what could we do? That was just how Raiser's Edge online giving worked."
The problem isn't just aesthetics. It's that online donation forms in the Raiser's Edge ecosystem weren't designed with conversion optimization in mind because they were built when online giving was an afterthought to the core product—a checkbox feature to say "yes, we have online giving too."
Compare this to Fundraise Up, which was built from the ground up around one question: how do we make giving as frictionless as possible for donors and as revenue-optimized as possible for nonprofits? The same donor clicking "Donate" on a Fundraise Up-powered site has a completely different experience. The form loads instantly, inline on the organization's website—no redirect. If they're a returning donor, the system recognizes them and shows just three fields instead of ten. Apple Pay is prominently displayed for one-click giving. The suggested amounts aren't generic—AI analyzes this donor's history and capacity to suggest $75, $100, or $150 instead of $25, $50, $100. The form is clearly designed for mobile, with large touch targets and logical flow. After completing the gift, the donor sees an intelligent upsell: "Would you like to add $10 to cover processing fees?" About 25% say yes, effectively reducing your net processing cost by a quarter.
Organizations making this switch consistently see 30-50% improvement in conversion rate—the percentage of people who start the donation process and actually complete it. They also see 20-30% increases in average gift amount because AI-suggested amounts are calibrated to individual donor capacity rather than one-size-fits-all.
For that nonprofit processing $500,000 annually, a 40% conversion improvement plus 25% higher average gifts means bringing in roughly $140,000 in additional revenue from the same website traffic. Not from more marketing spend. Not from better acquisition. Simply from reducing the friction between a donor's intent to give and actually completing the gift.
This is what makes the Raiser's Edge versus Fundraise Up question different from most software decisions. It's not about features or price—it's about whether your platform is optimized for how donors actually give today. And if it's not, every day you wait to switch costs you real revenue.
Beyond Raiser's Edge: What Actually Changes When You Switch
The hardest part of considering a switch from Raiser's Edge isn't the technical migration—though that requires planning. It's the mental model shift from thinking about donor management as "maintaining a database" to thinking about it as "optimizing giving experiences."
In the Raiser's Edge worldview, the software is a repository. Gifts come in through various channels. Staff enter them. The database stores them. When someone needs information, they query the database, export to Excel, and analyze externally.
With Fundraise Up, the platform is an active participant in fundraising. It doesn't just store data about gifts—it facilitates the giving itself. It doesn't just record donor information—it personalizes donor experiences in real-time. It doesn't wait for staff to query it—it surfaces insights automatically. Let's walk through what actually changes in practice when you choose to move beyond Raiser's Edge.
The Donor's Experience
A donor who gave $100 to your education programs last year receives your annual appeal email and begins clicking through to give again.
In the Raiser's Edge, they're redirected to a generic form. It asks for their name, address, email, phone, and payment information—even though you already have most of this. The suggested amounts are $25, $50, $100, and $250. They choose $100 again because it's familiar. They complete the gift. Three days later, after the staff processes the batch, they receive an acknowledgment email.
In Fundraise Up, the donation form loads inline on your website, recognizes them as a returning donor and shows three fields: donation amount, payment method, and a checkbox saying "Use my information on file." The suggested amounts are $100, $125, $150—calibrated to their history. The impact text adapts in real-time: "Your gift provides tutoring for 8 students." They tap Apple Pay and complete the gift in twelve seconds. An acknowledgment email arrives in their inbox before they've closed the donation page. After completing the gift, they see: "Thank you! Want to double your impact? Add $100 more to fund a complete scholarship." Twenty-five percent of donors presented with this intelligent post-gift upsell say yes. Same donor. Same intent to give. Completely different experience—and dramatically different outcome.
The Staff Experience
Meanwhile, on the nonprofit side, the operations manager who used to spend Tuesday mornings processing online gifts from the previous week is doing something else entirely because there's nothing to process.
The Fundraise Up gift appeared in the system instantly. The accounting integration created the journal entry automatically. The donor's record updated. The email acknowledgment sent. The dashboard that shows campaign progress refreshes in real-time.
Let's look at a hypothetical scenario: It's 3 PM on a Thursday when the executive director stops by and asks, "How are we tracking on the annual campaign?" In the Raiser's Edge world, this triggers a sequence: log into the database, run the campaign query, export to Excel, create a pivot table, generate a chart, save as an image, and email to the ED. Time investment: 45 minutes.
With Fundraise Up, the response is: "Here's the link to the campaign dashboard. It's live." The ED pulls it up on her phone. Total raised. Gifts by size. Progress to goal. Trend over time. All there, all current, all interactive. Time investment: 90 seconds.
This pattern repeats across every donor touchpoint. Where Raiser's Edge requires manual work—exporting data, formatting reports, processing gifts, updating records—Fundraise Up handles it automatically. Where Raiser's Edge stores information that staff must extract and analyze, Fundraise Up surfaces insights proactively.
Organizations typically report that staff time spent on database administration drops 60-70% after switching. That's not because people are working less hard. It's because the platform is designed to automate what used to require manual effort.
The Cost Reality
When discussing Raiser's Edge versus Fundraise Up, cost conversations often start with software licensing and end up somewhere completely different.
The surface comparison looks like this: Raiser's Edge costs about $40,000-60,000 annually for a typical midsize nonprofit when you factor in licenses, modules, integrations, and support. Fundraise Up runs $15,000-25,000 annually, all-in. So you save $20,000-35,000 per year. That's true, but it's not the real story.
The real cost of Raiser's Edge isn't the licensing—it's the opportunity cost of lost donations due to poor conversion, the payment processing premiums (3.5-4.5% versus Fundraise Up's 2.2-2.9%), and the staff time consumed by manual processes.
Consider the wildlife conservation foundation we mentioned earlier—they were processing $450,000 in online donations annually through Raiser's Edge. The cost of this payment processing was running about 4.2% after fees—roughly $18,900 annually. Staff spent approximately 8 hours per month manually processing recurring gifts—about $3,800 annually in fully-loaded labor costs. The online conversion rate was 38%.
They switched to Fundraise Up. Payment processing dropped to 2.6%—saving $7,200 annually. Recurring gift processing became automatic, freeing up those 8 monthly hours. But the big change was conversion: it jumped from 38% to 68%.
That 30-percentage-point conversion improvement meant that of the 6,800 people who started the donation process annually, 2,040 more completed gifts. At $87 average gift size, that's an additional $177,000 in revenue.
Let's put that in context: The software cost savings were about $22,000 annually (moving from ~$38,000 for RE to ~$16,000 for Fundraise Up). The payment processing savings was $7,200. But the conversion improvement generated $177,000 in additional gifts.
Total first-year financial impact: $206,000 improvement for a $30,000 one-time migration investment.
This is why the cost conversation quickly moves beyond software licensing. The software itself is the smallest part of the equation. What matters is whether your platform helps or hinders donors trying to give to you.
The Migration Reality
Let's address the concern that stops many organizations from even considering alternatives: "Migration sounds like a nightmare." The truth is that migrating from Raiser's Edge to Fundraise Up is not trivial. It requires planning, preparation, and patience. But it's also not the six-month organizational disruption that people imagine.
Most migrations follow this arc: You spend three weeks assessing your current state. You invest four weeks cleaning your Raiser's Edge data. You configure Fundraise Up over four weeks. You execute a test migration and validate everything works correctly. You run parallel systems for two weeks. Then you cut over. Total calendar time: fourteen to sixteen weeks. Actual intensive work from your team: probably 80-100 hours spread across that period.
The cost for professional migration support typically runs $25,000-40,000 (depending on data complexity). This includes data cleanup, platform configuration, integration setup, staff training, and post-launch support.
Compare this to the $20,000-35,000 you'll save annually on software costs plus the $150,000-200,000 in additional revenue from improved conversion. The migration pays for itself in roughly two to three months.
Making the Decision
So how do you actually decide whether to switch from Raiser's Edge to Fundraise Up?
Start by getting honest about your current costs—not just the software licensing, but the full picture. What are you paying in payment processing fees? How much staff time goes to manual data work? What's your online conversion rate, and what would a 30-50% improvement mean in actual revenue?
Then look at where your revenue comes from and where it's going. If online giving represents 40% of revenue today and is growing 15-20% annually, you're running a digital fundraising operation on pre-digital infrastructure. That mismatch is costing you money every single day.
Calculate the business case. Most organizations find that between reduced software costs, lower payment processing fees, freed staff time, and improved online conversion, switching to Fundraise Up generates 3-5x return on investment in the first year. But don't make this decision purely on spreadsheets. The real question is strategic: do you want to be optimized for how donors gave in 1989, or how they give today?
Moving Forward
For decades, Raiser's Edge was the right answer for most nonprofits. It solved the real problem of moving from paper filing systems to digital databases. Organizations that adopted it gained significant advantages, but the world has moved on. The question facing nonprofits today isn't whether to move from paper to digital—it's whether to move from offline-optimized digital to online-optimized digital. From platforms designed for processing checks to platforms designed for facilitating giving. From systems that store data to systems that generate insights.
This transition will happen for every nonprofit eventually, because online giving isn't a trend—it's the future, and increasingly the present. The only question is whether you make the move proactively while you can plan it carefully, or reactively later when the current approach has become obviously untenable. The organizations switching now aren't doing it because they hate Raiser's Edge; they're doing it because they've looked at where donor behavior is heading, where their own revenue mix is going, and where technology capabilities have evolved—and recognized that the gap between their current platform and their actual needs is only getting wider. They're choosing to close that gap now, while they can do it on their terms, rather than waiting until it becomes an emergency.
Partner with Ohana Focus
Ohana Focus specializes in helping nonprofits navigate the transition from legacy donor databases to modern giving platforms. We bring deep expertise combined with real-world understanding of nonprofit fundraising operations. We're not Fundraise Up resellers pushing a product. We're independent consultants who help you make the right decision for your specific situation. Our goal is to help you raise more money with less friction. We've successfully guided forty-plus nonprofits through this transition. We know where the pitfalls hide, which decisions matter and which don't, and how to get your team from skeptical about change to wondering why you waited so long.
Most organizations recoup their migration investment within six to twelve months through payment processing savings alone—before accounting for conversion improvements and efficiency gains. The question isn't whether the economics work; it's whether you're ready to make the move.
About Ohana Focus
Ohana Focus is a certified Fundraise Up consulting partner dedicated to helping nonprofits harness modern technology for fundraising success. We believe great donor management isn't about which database you use—it's about matching your technology to how donors actually give.
Our CRM strategy practice has helped hundreds of nonprofits evaluate their platforms, make informed decisions about alternatives, and successfully execute transitions when switching makes sense. We bring both technical expertise and fundraising operations experience—understanding not just how systems work, but how nonprofits actually use them. The nonprofit sector deserves technology consultants who care more about your fundraising success than their own billings, and that's what we aim to be.