Moving university advancement from Raiser's Edge NXT to Salesforce is a data migration: constituents, households, gifts, pledges, soft credits, funds, appeals, actions, and documents leave one system for another. Salesforce Fundraising, available inside Education Cloud and Nonprofit Cloud, has standard objects for each. ElevateActual treats the move as a partnership with the advancement services team.
What Does Raiser's Edge NXT Do?
Status. Raiser's Edge NXT is Blackbaud's fundraising and donor management system, used by university advancement offices and foundations. It covers constituent records, gift and pledge processing, campaigns, funds and appeals, events, memberships, actions, and reporting. It remains an active product as of October 2026.
Rationale for this page. Advancement leaders ask us what a move involves, usually because the institution already runs Salesforce for admissions, student success, or continuing education and wants alumni and donors on the same record. The platform rule here is simple: Salesforce Fundraising is one set of objects whether it runs inside Education Cloud (Agentforce Education) or Nonprofit Cloud, so the decision is about where the institution's people data lives, not about which fundraising features exist. Our advancement page describes what we build on it, and the Salesforce for higher education guide places it beside the rest of the campus.
Why Do Advancement Teams Consider Moving?
- One constituent record across the institution. A graduate was an applicant, a student, a continuing education learner, and now a donor. When each stage lives in a different system, advancement rebuilds the relationship from scratch. On Salesforce the Person Account carries all of it.
- Two interfaces. Some reviewers on G2 report moving back and forth between the database view and the web view to finish routine work, and add-on costs. We report that as reviewer sentiment, not as our own measurement.
- Giving and engagement on one storefront. Institutions already running a Salesforce Commerce storefront for continuing education want online giving, event tickets, and memberships in the same cart. Our online giving on Salesforce Commerce article explains that pattern.
- Automation and AI on the donor record. Flow-based acknowledgments, RFM scoring, donor briefs, and Agentforce for Fundraising, listed on Salesforce Help under Fundraising in Education, all run on standard objects the institution controls.
- History. Blackbaud disclosed a security incident in 2020, and the related FTC order and state settlements concluded in 2024, per Blackbaud's SEC filing; these are historical facts that boards sometimes ask about, not a statement about any institution's data today.
What Moves and What Stays?
Method. Every category in Raiser's Edge NXT has a destination in Salesforce Fundraising. The platform rule for each row is that gifts, commitments, and designations are standard objects, and anything without a standard home gets a written reason before a custom object is built. Salesforce Help's Fundraising in Education section documents the objects below.
| Raiser's Edge NXT data | Where it goes in Salesforce | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Individual constituents | Person Accounts (Account with IsPersonAccount) | Matched to existing Salesforce people when the institution already runs Education Cloud. |
| Organizations and foundations | Account | Contacts as related people. |
| Households and spousal links | Household accounts via Group Membership, AccountContactRelation | Household naming and rollups are native. |
| Relationships | ContactContactRelation, AccountContactRelation | Reciprocal types configured once. |
| Gifts (cash, stock, in kind) | GiftTransaction with GiftTransactionDesignation | Split gifts become one transaction with several designation lines. |
| Pledges and installments | GiftCommitment with GiftCommitmentSchedule; payments as GiftTransaction | Recurring gifts use the same commitment pattern. |
| Soft credits | GiftSoftCredit | Role and percentage per credit. |
| Campaigns and appeals | Campaign hierarchy, OutreachSourceCode | Appeal packages become source codes under the campaign. |
| Funds | GiftDesignation | Default designations attach to campaigns and commitments. |
| Actions and contact reports | Task, Event, Interaction Summaries | Open actions migrate as tasks; major-gift notes as interaction summaries. |
| Events and registrations | Campaign, CampaignMember | Ticketed events can sell through the Salesforce Commerce storefront. |
| Memberships | GiftCommitment with a membership designation, or a documented custom object | The Education Cloud developer guide documents no dedicated membership object as of October 2026. We decide this one with you. |
| Tributes and planned gifts | GiftTribute, PlannedGift | Standard objects in Fundraising. |
| Attributes and custom fields | Fields on the Person Account or related object, after review | Most attributes retire. The ones that drive segmentation stay. |
| Documents and media | Files (ContentDocument) linked to the record | Bulk export, linked by constituent key. |
| Giving summaries and rollups | DonorGiftSummary, recalculated | Rebuilt from transactions and reconciled to the old totals. |
| General ledger and finance system | Stays where it is | Salesforce posts gift data to finance through a supported integration. |
What Does the Salesforce Side Look Like?
Status after go-live. A gift officer opens a Person Account and sees the donor profile, giving history, open commitments, relationships, and interaction summaries in one place. Gift processing runs through GiftEntry and GiftBatch with guided flows for single and batch entry. Acknowledgments and tax receipts are generated from Flow, and RFM scoring runs natively.
Alumni and donors use an Experience Cloud portal to update their information, see their giving history, and register for events. Where the institution runs a storefront, online giving and event tickets sit in the same cart as continuing education courses; that storefront is what we call Commerce on Core, meaning B2B or D2C Commerce on the Salesforce Platform with an LWR Experience Cloud storefront.
The platform rule for the data model: Education Cloud or Nonprofit Cloud, not both. If the university already runs Education Cloud for students, turn on Fundraising inside it so alumni are the same Person Accounts they were as students. If a separately governed foundation runs its own org with no student data, Nonprofit Cloud is a reasonable home. Our Nonprofit Cloud versus Education Cloud for advancement article works through that decision. Either way, the SIS remains the system of record for degrees and the finance system for the ledger; Salesforce holds the relationship and the gift.
How Do We Run the Migration?
- Discovery. We sit with advancement services and walk the Raiser's Edge NXT configuration: constituent codes, fund and appeal structures, gift types, attributes, query libraries, and the finance export. Each element is tagged keep, map, or retire. The institution's advancement services lead co-owns this inventory.
- Object mapping. A signed mapping document from every Raiser's Edge NXT table and code to its Salesforce object and value. Fund codes map to designations, appeal codes to source codes, and constituent codes to relationship or affiliation types.
- Gift validation settings. Salesforce Help documents which gift validations can be paused in Fundraising Settings during bulk loads. We pause the ones that would reject historical records, load, reconcile, and turn validations back on before users return.
- Initial load and delta loads. A full load into a sandbox, reconciled to Raiser's Edge NXT totals by fund, fiscal year, and campaign. Then production, while Raiser's Edge NXT stays live, followed by delta loads of gifts and changes entered since.
- Parallel period. Gift processing continues in Raiser's Edge NXT for one to two weeks while daily deltas land in Salesforce and the team compares totals.
- Identity and username planning. When an alumni portal or giving site already exists, we decide how constituents will log in, how portal usernames avoid collisions with existing Salesforce users, and how a donor who is also a current continuing education learner is matched to one Person Account rather than two.
- Cutover. A dated switch, never in the last week of the fiscal year or during a giving day. Raiser's Edge NXT becomes read-only.
- Hot test. On the first day, the team enters a real gift, a pledge with a schedule, and a soft credit on production, generates the acknowledgment, and confirms the finance export.
Our data migration into Education Cloud checklist has the reconciliation queries and sign-offs. Other platform guides sit on the migrations hub.
When Should You Not Move?
What to decide. We would rather tell you now than six months in.
- The shop is small. An advancement office of a few people, running annual fund and a handful of major gifts, is well served by Raiser's Edge NXT. Salesforce Fundraising rewards an institution that will use the shared record.
- You are happy with the fundraising depth. Raiser's Edge NXT has decades of fundraising-specific features. If gift processing, prospect management, and reporting meet your needs and nobody is asking for a shared record with the rest of the university, the case for moving is weak.
- Administrator capacity is thin. Salesforce needs an administrator who owns the configuration, permission sets, and flows after we leave. If that person does not exist and will not be hired, the move will stall.
- The rest of the campus is not on Salesforce. Without admissions, student success, or continuing education on Salesforce, the shared record, which is the strongest reason to move, is absent.
What to decide before building: Education Cloud or Nonprofit Cloud as the home, how many fiscal years of gift history migrate as transactions, how memberships are modeled, and who owns the mapping document on the advancement services side.
Questions We Hear
Will our giving totals match after the move?
They must, and the reconciliation is part of the method. Every load is reconciled to Raiser's Edge NXT by fund, fiscal year, campaign, and constituent before anyone signs off. Rollups in Salesforce are recalculated from the migrated transactions, not copied, so a mismatch surfaces immediately and is traced to a specific record.
Should we choose Education Cloud or Nonprofit Cloud?
Fundraising is the same set of objects in both, per Salesforce Help. Choose Education Cloud when the university runs or plans to run admissions, student success, or continuing education on Salesforce, so alumni are the same Person Accounts they were as students. Choose Nonprofit Cloud when a separately governed foundation runs its own org with no student data.
How many years of history should we migrate?
Enough to support lifetime giving, recognition societies, and multi-year pledge tracking, which for most institutions means all gift transactions. Actions, event attendance, and attributes are usually trimmed to a recent window. The decision is the institution's; we provide the storage and effort implications for each option.
Can online giving move at the same time?
Yes. Giving pages run on a Salesforce Commerce storefront or on Experience Cloud forms, write GiftTransaction records directly, and trigger the acknowledgment flow. Payment runs through Salesforce Payments with Stripe or sits beside the campus payment processor through a hosted checkout. We sequence it so the new giving page launches at cutover.
What happens to our Raiser's Edge NXT queries and reports?
They are rebuilt as Salesforce reports, list views, and dashboards on the new objects. In discovery we export the query library and sort it by last-run date, which retires most of it. The remainder, typically the fiscal-year gift reports, the pledge aging report, and segmentation lists for appeals, are rebuilt and validated against the old output during the parallel period.
How long does a Raiser's Edge NXT migration take?
For a single advancement office with clean constituent keys, plan on roughly four to six months from discovery to hot test. Long gift history, complex membership programs, multiple foundations, and a finance integration extend that. The pace is set less by record volume than by how quickly the advancement services team can sign off the mapping decisions.