Quick Takeaways from the Raiser's Edge PUB

-

 Hey you guys!

Just a few quick takeaways from the Raiser's Edge Product Update Briefing last week...

Overall, I commend Blackbaud for finally articulating its clear vision for its flagship product. I believe that nonprofits new to Blackbaud will find a wealth of valuable resources. However, long-standing customers may not be as pleased with the new bold direction.  


  • The total RE web view solution is not for long time Blackbaud customers. Blackbaud hopes they come along for the ride, but it clearly wasn’t made for them   
  • While Blackbaud will offer an array of products, as far as extending the abilities of RE goes, this will largely be up to third-party services
  • Blackbaud offers many tools to extend the abilities of RE (some might argue not enough) but it demands end users pick up skills they didn’t have during the classic era
  • Almost no mention of Insights Designer. This is interesting given how Blackbaud has shackled the product with very limited fields and no calculated fields ability. I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature is killed in favor of the partnership with Microsoft (Power BI). 
  • RE is a fundraising platform first, and a CRM second. Despite all the features and improvements(some might bristle at the latter) it’s ability to manage relationships still pales compared to some competitors 


I think over the next few months MANY Blackbaud customers will engage in serious existential discussions about the future of Blackbaud at their organizations - if they haven’t already.  


As always....


Yours in Data

-Dave

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting the number of years each donor gave

-
Hey you guys! (in my best Electric Company yell) Here's my first video for the YouTube channel.  I think the most common question I see on the Facebook Raiser's Edge support group is "How can I get a list of constituents and how many years they gave during any given number of years?"  You can use many tools to answer this question, but I love being able to take a data set and just dive into it with Tableau. Nothing else really compares for me.  This solution works with any donor data system, by the way.  Check it out here . Yours in data -Dave
Read more

Comparing Age Demographics Across Years

-
Hey you guys! Here's a question posted to the Facebook RE support group last week (but I've seen it many times): "How can I compare my donor age demographics to what they were 10 years ago?"   RE isn't exactly built to answer that question. With a couple of calculated fields in Tableau, you can quickly visualize this comparison from a simple RE export.  Check it out here .   What do you think?  Comments are welcome! Next time, I'll discuss ways to display the dates of donors' first gifts and perform some quick data analysis. I will also do it in a fraction of the time it would have taken to export this from RE as a summary field. Yours in Data -Dave
Read more

Analyzing First Gift and Last Gift Data

-
 Hey you guys! A very common topic on the Facebook Raiser's Edge Support group is "how can analyze giving between more than two years, without having to run multiple reports?"  I must maintain some hope that eventually Blackbaud will dramatically beef-up the built-in reporting abilities of RE, but for now there are third-party options.   I've been doing multiple year analysis of donors for a decade now in Tableau.  There are some very quick methods to tackle this issue.  You only need four fields to do a considerable amount of analysis: Gift ID Constituent ID Gift Amount Gift Date It will take FAR less time to export these as Gift Records rather than Constituent Records with summaries.  With ALL gift records, you can analyze your data and trends at any scale (three years, five years, ten years, etc.). Here's the simple version . A much more thorough take on deep retention and KPI metrics can be found on YouTube by Concourse Hosting.   They do some real...
Read more