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Event Forms - Do All the Blackbaud Solutions Require BBMS?

Tom Klimchak

We're looking at some ways to make our event registration more efficient than our current process which is mostly accomplished by manually matching up registration emails with third party payment reports and then manually adding those registrants into RE.

We understand that both NetCommunity and Online Express seem to have the ability to build event forms and collect registrant information in RE, but it seems like BOTH require BBMS (which we're almost definitely not going to use)… Is that true, though? Do both products require BBMS or can we use or both of those products with our own payment service or just without payment at all (for the free events)…

We're often confused by the plethora of Blackbaud products that have partly overlapping functions… Thanks!

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Heather MacKenzie

In the past, at least, they don't require BBMS. I used another cc processor with NetCommunity at a former job, although it was about 5 years ago now.

Tom Klimchak

The official answer from Blackbaud support is as follows:

"To use Online Express BBMS is required."
“Yes, BBMS & BBPS are required for NetCommunity as well”

Sooo… I guess we're going to look at options other than Blackbaud for event form solutions. ?

Spring Velazquez

May I ask why you're not going with BBMS as a processer?

Tom Klimchak

Sure… a few reasons, actually:

The payment fees for BBMS are actually a bit higher than what we're paying now because our University runs everything through one payment vendor which gets us a bigger discount than Advancement alone would get.
There is a debate internally about whether or not our agreement with this other payment vendor has an “exclusivity clause" which may need to be worked through at some point.
Our Controller's Office is overwhelmed with things to do and “adding another payment gateway” is pretty low on their priority list.
We have a subtle lack of trustworthiness in Blackbaud's business practices right now. The security issues and technical issues with RE NXT started it but the $50/month “Payment Enablement” fee really showed Blackbaud's true colors…

We've tried to open the conversation about BBMS for years without much success here. Initially BBMS had some big drawbacks for us, but I believe most of those major challenges have rectified in the last few years. We're going to schedule a demo with some stakeholders and try again.

Spring Velazquez

Thanks! I really was just curious and I get not adding more to your controller's tasks. All great points too

robert badley

Tom, our situation is that we use RE 7.96 and Luminate Online. Our credit card processor is not BBMS for either platform but a couple of years ago BB instituted a fee whereby we are charged $0.25 “Interconnect Fee” per transaction by BB because we do not use BBMS. Last time I did a comparison of what we pay plus the Interconnect fee to what BB was offering us with BBMS it was still a bit cheaper to not use BBMS. Can you say if you have a similar fee?

Tom Klimchak

Oh, it's MUCH cheaper to NOT use BBMS ?

Their “one rate” is currently 2.598% + $.26 per transaction (North America, 10/25/21.. the rate has crept up over the last few years) but our external processor fees are a fair bit lower than that. I don't have all the most recent details (and not sure if I can share them) but our financial people thought the BBMS fee was actually quite high compared to what we pay now.

We use NO Blackbaud products for accepting online gifts. Instead we use a combination of internal web developers for some forms and a non-Blackbaud Crowdfunding software package for others and we feed that through our processor's API.

We're intrigued by BBMS because it might be a simpler solution that may save us a lot time and effort. If that proves to be true than the higher processing fees might be worthwhile…