Blackbaud reviews

This company has some pretty amazing thoughts about their place in the world and how they treat their customers and employees. They hang propaganda all around the building about how we own the experience and how we are what makes them great. That's only half true. We do own experiences as if you are left to your own devices to make every customer happy, but if you fail, even after being coached to take chances to make customers happy, you are basically treated like you are a leper. The upper management tends to have no idea what the common employees want, who they are, or what makes them tick. They are also vindictive. If you go against them, or go outside the chain of command to get something done, you might as well go ahead and put your head on the chopping block yourself because they are already planning how to get rid of you. They are so concerned about how to bring in more money, but have no solid ideas how to do that. They hold incredibly boring all company meetings to tell us how we are going to make more money, but talk in riddles and metaphors and give us nothing more on how we are going to make that money. They also have no idea what their products are and why they were successful before being assimilated into the Blackbaud "family". What they do care a GREAT deal about is their own image as a company. They do everything they can to appear like a great citizen of the country while offering no raises for 3 of the past 4 years (blaming an economy they had no solid evidence would affect our industry), and dismantle the companies they purchase and put people in the unemployment lines. That's real great citizenship. Speaking of image, notice how all the positive reviews seem to all say the same thing? That would likely be because for every negative they receive on this site, they counter with five positives. I'm so certain they do that I would bet a billion dollars on it. Avoid this company unless you want to work until you can barely stand, always be blamed when things are not right, and have no desire to work your way out of an entry level position. Plus, they will slap you with a non-compete clause that will limit the entry level people from finding other jobs if they decide those things that went wrong warranted you being sent to the unemployment line.

The critical importance of the nonprofit market to American life makes the mediocrity of the products, vision, sales approach, management, etc all the more disappointing. Selling Windows XP-era technology is embarrassing, and even the cloud tech they bought with Convio is getting long in the tooth. Blackbaud has long since lost any "innovation" DNA it may have had, and has been coasting on its reputation and brand name as the de facto NPO standard. The acquisition of Convio successfully bought Blackbaud some more time and runway by eliminating its most viable challenger. However, if it requires major surgery on product management, sales, and services to transform itself into a modern software company that can compete with nimbler,more flexible platforms....I don't envy the next CEO.