Tag Archives: The Raiser’s Edge

The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with Gmail… A series of case studies (1)

Beginner, Not Code, , , , ,

This is the first in a series of case studies looking at custom integration of Blackbaud products.

Unlike very many of our previous third party integration application the main driving force behind this application, Biographica, was the fact that we could do it. We did not have any particular client knocking on our door asking us link the two products and Google , funnily enough, did not approach us either asking us to develop an integration between The Raiser’s Edge and Gmail.

Continue reading The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with Gmail… A series of case studies (1) →

IDLookup Search

Not Code, , ,

I am really excited to release this new version of IDLookup which contains a major new component: IDLookup Search. This allows users to bring the power of IDLookup into day-to-day searching, with a large variety of search fields for looking up constituents on the fly (including those organisations who have yet to upgrade to RE7.92). It also lets you have complete control over your search results using IDLookup’s powerful criteria sets so you can decide how tight your search should be and tweak results based on your business rules.

We think that the new search functionality in 7.92 is really good. We also know that there are some people who have complained that they are not able to control exactly how records are searched. Also there are a load of organizations that, for whatever reason, are unable to upgrade currently to 7.92. This solution gives them the power of IDLookup but for day to day searches.

Check out the screencast for a better overview of how it works.

Release of Biographica – Integrating The Raiser’s Edge and GMail

Not Code, , ,

We are really excited to release Biographica. This application integrates The RAiser’s Edge with Gmail (or Google Apps). This means that from within your Gmail inbox you can see details of a supporter as their email arrives. At the current time we show the biographical details (name, address, email and phone), constituent code, solicitor/canvasser, a gift summary and recently attended events. We only show this information if it is available for the constituent (so we don’t leave a lot of blank headers and take up a lot of space). Check out the product and view the screencast on our Zeidman Development site: http://www.zeidman.info/Integration/biographica.php

Continue reading Release of Biographica – Integrating The Raiser’s Edge and GMail →

Testing GoRaise Mobile for The Raiser’s Edge

Beginner, Opinion, , ,

I have been in the fortunate position to have been testing a new application for The Raiser’s Edge. GoRaise Mobile is a mobile interface to The Raiser’s Edge by Electric Plum. I have had a lot of contact with Shaun Sullivan, Electric Plum’s CEO in the past when he was CTO of Blackbaud. Those of you who have heard him speak at Blackbaud conferences will know that he is passionate about technology and is a real inspiration. Electric Plum’s, soon to be released product really shines and it is clear that this is a gap in the market ready to be filled.

Continue reading Testing GoRaise Mobile for The Raiser’s Edge →

Introducing RETweet Professional for The Raiser’s Edge

Not Code, , , , ,

At the end of last year we released RETweet for all our newsletter subscribers (sign up to receive future offers and news). It was a great success allowing you to see your constituents’ Twitter feed directly from within The Raiser’s Edge. Now, with the release of RETweet Professional, you can search for any keyword, user or hashtag just as you would in Twitter. RETweet Professional brings you all the features of RETweet but also allows you to find out who is talking about your organisation and your mission. From the feed, RETweet Professional will look up the constituents using a fuzzy search [1], allow you create you own constituent if it cannot find it or you can search in RE using the regular search screen. The application gives you the option of connecting a Twitter user to a constituent and once you have done that you can save their tweet as a notepad. You can also set up a “love” attribute for use within RETWeet Professional. You can assign a value directly from the application and it will save onto the constiteunt record without you having to open it up.

Track the conversation that people are having about your organisation directly from within The Raiser’s Edge. Social media has been brought one step closer to your organisation.

Download RETweet Professional Demo (includes RETweet)

 

[1] On a technical note we are forced to do a fuzzy search as the only two identifying fields that we retrieve from Twitter are full name and location. We split up both of these fields into first and last name and city, state and country. For the location we attempt to see if the values we have assumed are in the code tables. If they are we know that we have assigned the values correctly. If they do not appear in the code tables then we do not assign the values on creating a constituent. When searching we give each term a weighting. Only constituents that match the last name or the first five characters of the organization name will ever appear in the fuzzy search results. After that each of the other terms’ weighting are added up to determine which results appear in the match. City and the full first name (as opposed to the person’s initial) are given a higher weighting so matches based on those values will appear more prominently.

MailChimp Offers Non-Profit guides – Works well with Chimpegration

Not Code, Opinion, ,

At Zeidman Development we are big fans of MailChimp. We use it ourselves to send out our newsletters and we have integrated it with The Raiser’s Edge in the form of Chimpegration. MailChimp have now hired somebody to help non-profits make better use of MailChimp. Their latest blog post explains how to use merge variables in MailChimp.

Users of The Raiser’s Edge should be used to using merge variables given the built in tools that link RE to Word. The article explains how you use the corresponding functionality in MailChimp. What is really good is that if you set up merge variables in MailChimp you can easily link those variable to query output in Chimpegration. In the free version you are able to export your data to MailChimp and in the Pro version you can synchronize the data sets. That means you can use MailChimp merge variables as an online data source. If you tie it into your website, users can log in, update their merge variables themselves and all that is fed back into The Raiser’s Edge on synchronization. Sophisticated, flexible integration in one product.

For more information about Chimpegration take a look at our site: http://www.zeidman.info/downloads/chimpegration.php

RETweet Released for The Raiser’s Edge

Not Code, ,

We are really excited to release our latest free product RETweet. Setup a Twitter phone type, add Twitter addresses to The Raiser’s Edge and for each constituent that has one and then follow their tweets directly from their constituent record.

Follow their activity, check out their followers and who they are following. From this connect to Twitter to easily respond their tweets or click on their links.

We are offering this plug-in for free.  Indeed it was offered for free to all those of you who signed up to our newsletter as a big thank you before the holiday season. If you missed our newsletter then sign up now and we’ll send you a link. For everyone else you’ll have to wait until the new year. If you want to have a preview then check out the screencast

The challenges of developing generic solutions for The Raiser’s Edge

Not Code, , , , , , ,

We develop a number of different types of solutions that connect The Raiser’s Edge with third party applications. When this is done for one organisation the hardest challenge is getting the requirements to match the end user’s as closely as possible. However we also develop a lot for third party applications directly. Most recently we released Chimpegration but there have been many others that integrate many different areas of the application. With these clients the important point is not so much as to match one set of requirements exactly but to match as many requirements exactly!

I have yet to come across two organisations that have set up RE the same way. Sometimes the differences are small but sometimes they are very large. One recurring theme is that of phone/email types. The Raiser’s Edge seems to be relatively unique in its setup of these values. Not only are phones and emails stored in the same location but you can store them according to address type too. How does this match up with a third party web application that uses email address as a primary key? They may have one field for home phone, one for mobile and possibly one other. How do you get that tie in with the possibility of any combination of phone and email types? I have seen a whole plethora of regular phone types e.g.

Home
Business
Preferred
Home 1
Home 2
(etc)
Primary
Work
Company

Those are just the ones I can think of as I write this. And of course each of these could have a number after them.

Then of course there is the proliferation of email (or is it e-mail, etc) addresses.

What techniques do we use to overcome these issues? When we are working with a third party developer directly it is often in their interest to develop the configuration piece. This saves them a lot of development cost. This means that we simply say to them if you want us to update a phone number you need to tell us which type it is. This is then supplied in the file/webservice. Likewise when we supply that piece of data, we also send the phone type too.

Another solution is to build a configuration part to the application. This is what we did with Chimpegration. We allow the end user to map the fields that they want to synchronise so that they specify which fields on MailChimp map to the fields on The Raiser’s Edge.

The last solution is the least desirable. It is possible to simply say that the home phone number should be called “Home” and email address should be called “Email” – end of story. This is clearly the simplest and cheapest but unless you have a lot of sway over the organisations that you are selling to it is unlikely that you are going to get many buyers.

Phone and email types are perhaps the most obvious but what other issues can arise?

Where you are collecting business details, should these be added to an organisation or to a business address on the constituent record? Should you create a new constituent for the organisation? How can you be sure that it does not already exist in the system but under a slightly different name. One solution is to allow the end user to review the matches that have been made but this again adds to the development cost. It could also be prohibitive if the volume of data you are bringing in is large.

What about fields that do not have an obvious place in The Raiser’s Edge. One application that we worked with had an anniversary date. There is no such field in RE. We gave the end user the option to ignore the field, store it has the spouse relationship from date or store it as an attribute.

What happens if one organisation makes a field mandatory? When I work with an organisation directly I will ask them what mandatory fields they have set up on their system. If, as part of the process, I have to create a new constituent then I will ask them to give me a default value for that field. For a generic solution this has to be worked into the application configuration.

You can see much of this in action in Chimpegration where we account for mandatory fields and different combinations of phone types and emails. Check out the synchronisation screencast for a glimpse of this in action.

So all said and done is this type of solution to be avoided? Absolutely not! It is not cheap because of the extra work involved in making the application work for all types of organisations. When people complain about NetCommunity or Patron Edge integrating badly with The Raiser’s Edge hopefully this article will have given you some insight as to the skills required by Blackbaud in getting the integration to work well. (Update 15th Dec 2011: I should clarify that given the difficulty in developing generic solutions I actually believe that Blackbaud have done a good job with these integrations)

If you are a third party application wondering how to integrate with The Raiser’s Edge then speak so us. We are skilled at doing this and have done it a lot. We can either do it for your or we can share the development. When done well it is a great asset to your company and will bring Raiser’s Edge users to your application.

Introducing Blackbaud +1?

Not Code, Opinion, , , , , , , , ,

I’m a big fan of Google and a big fan of Blackbaud. What do the two have in common? I’m not sure really. They are very different companies offering very different product ranges. However one obvious difference that is currently affecting me day to day is the fact that whereas Google are changing their interface throughout to reflect a modern sleek approach, Blackbaud (for the their “Edge” range of products at least) are not. In fact, not only are they not changing the way they look and feel, these products are stuck in a design that is several generations old. Due to the nature of the products they are also very restricted as to what they can do.

At the Blackbaud Conference for nonprofits in Washington last month I saw a demo of new functionality in Blackbaud CRM. It was highlighted that this functionality is only available in the “webshell” feature set of the application (as opposed to the ClickOnce feature set). If you are not familiar with those terms then essentially the “webshell” is the functionality available for all in a browser whereas the ClickOnce functionality is available only on Windows. What this also means though is that the webshell can utilise html5 and not be restricted to Windows Forms. This means a beautiful upgrade of the user interface is possible with much less of a struggle.

With the news that there will not be an RE8 what does this mean to those on RE7? When I recently showed our Chimpegration application to MailChimp I felt the need to apologise for the way that The Raiser’s Edge looked. When you look at MailChimp’s website it is very cool and very funky, just as you would expect from a website devoted to email marketing that takes pride in the range of sophisticated email templates on offer.  Clearly there is a lot more technical wizardry to MailChimp than just the templates but if their site did not look good, you would be put off from creating a campaign through them. They could see that the RE7 interface was antiquated but were clearly impressed by the depth of functionality available to users which was matched in Chimpegration.

And that is the point. The most noticeable changes that Google makes in Gmail, calendar, docs, reader, etc are staring right at you in the form of the interface. But they also make a lot of functional additions too. With the release of RE7.92 Blackbaud will certainly make some good improvements but they cannot afford to stop there. The reason Google is updating is as a form of rebranding. Raiser’s Edge 7 does not have that luxury so it must shine with its functional enhancements and make them known as loudly as a new interface would do.