Vantaggi
Blackbaud was a good place to pick up a lot of professional experience. You get to work with a great varierty of clients in a highly professional and demanding environment. You are continually challenged and learn to develop client skills that will help you down the road in your career. They provide 3 weeks vacation right from your start date which is also nice. The work environment and facility is nice. The people are absolutely top notch. It can be quite difficult to get your foot in the door there, and so the result is there is a lot of high quality talent and really smart people.
Svantaggi
It can be very stressful. The professional services division works on implementing BB's software solutions after a new client purchases the software. Many times there is poor communication between the sales dept and professional services, which leads to all kinds of internal issues like not enough hours to bill againsts, bad project scoping, promising impossible timelines, etc. They also dangle the whole "bonus" thing when you get hired to make it look like you are going to be making tons of money every quarter on bonuses. The problem is that the company constantly changes the bonus plans seemingly making them good, then bad, then good, then bad. They can't just leave it alone, and it's all depending on the number of hours you bill - which you only have marginal control over. You can definately burn yourself out trying to max our your billable hours because they tend to pay lower salaries and promise big bonuses. I have heard that this has improved in recent years though.
