Blackbaud is a Venus Fly Trap. You will be stuck in an unwanted position.
Pros
- Start with 20 PTO days
Cons
From day one, the job is described as rainbows and butterflies and you are told how lucky you are to have gotten the job. No one is real with you. In training, you are told to under promise and over deliver, but the company does the exact opposite to its employees. When you take a job in support as a customer support analyst, you have an 18 month commitment to staying in support. Management tells you that this means you can move up to be a Coach, Manager, or Trainer within support, but that never happens in 18 months. As soon as you get close to 18 months and you think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, they offer you to cross train to support a second program. This extends your contract with support for another 9 months, but you really don't have a choice if you want to progress because it looks bad to say no. The raise for cross training is an insulting 6%. You are thrown in a classroom for 2 weeks and taught a new program at lightning speed and then expected to jump right back on the phones and be an expert of the new program as well. Blackbaud tries to make you think you are progressing by using these magical things called Adtracks. You pick a position you think you would want to become, and they give you a list of things to do to become that position. I'm sure at some point they were created with good intentions, but they essentially have become a bunch of hoops that you have to jump through to get raises and promotions. Some of the checkmarks are things you can do such as hit your stats, but a lot of the checkmarks are things Blackbaud has to set up for you such as job shadows and extra classes. These take for ever to get lined up and all they really do is keep you from getting raises that you have already earned. The support analyst position itself is awful. You take incoming calls for 5.5 hours a day from clients and you have another 2.5 hours a day to work on your existing cases. Half the time you get stuck on a long call and lose most of your time designated to working on other cases. Due to low staffing, you may or may not get that back. Some of the clients are very sweet, but others are very rude and treat you very poorly. Blackbaud is afraid to lose business so they don't stand up for their employees. The more a client kicks and screams, the more Blackbaud gives in. This doesn't hurt management, it hurts the analyst who has to deal with the client. We all know what flows down hill, and as a support analyst, you are at the very bottom of that hill. The last thing I'll say is this: look at the turnover rate. In a year, my team of 12-15 employees hired over 10 new employees and didn't grow in size. The good employees are not given an opportunity to progress so they find jobs at other companies.