Blackbaud Acquires eTapestry August 6, 2007

The Nonprofit Times reported a few minutes agao that Blackbaud is buying eTapestry for something like $25 million. I imagine Jay Love will get the majority of that, and wish him well and encourage him to do something constructive with it. But I fear for his customers.

If Blackbaud is consistent, it will kill off the eTapestry service and force its customers to convert to Raiser's Edge, as they did with Campagne's GiftMaker Pro.

My question is this: why are these companies selling out? eTapestry only had revenue of $7 million per year. Blackbaud doesn't have a compelling hosted solution, and I imagine Salesforce.com is eating into their market, despite the reliability problems they've had.

What's a nonprofit to do? Try GiftWorks, for one. And it looks as though Donorperfect is hanging in there, along with a few other competitors. If you're currently an eTap customer, please check us out, and download a free trial of GiftWorks today. You'll be pretty impressed with how usable it is, and how powerful it can be for your fundraising and mailing.

And if you stick with eTapestry and are forced over to Raiser's Edge, well, good luck. We wish you well with your new adventure, but please keep in mind that the average charge from Blackbaud is $40,000, according to their CEO.

Comments

I heard that eTapestry will be different. They will stick around. The COO stated that they expect to be at 15 million and 200 employees in the next 3-5 yrs. This guy is man of his word. So, eTap will live on.

eTapestry still treating workers right
August 12, 2007

Jay Love, president of eTapestry, started getting calls from area banks Wednesday morning...

(Edited by MR; follow full link to rest of story)

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070812/COLUMNISTS21/708120358/1033/COLUMNISTS

Good to hear; typically companies give 20% in stock options to employees. Will be interesting to learn the details. Congratulations, regardless.

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