I have been working on a new product which will hopefully be released soon. In this new product the user needs to be able to look up a constituent in as few key strokes as possible. The approach that I took was to use the same functionality as the Quick Find mechanism that you see on the records page in The Raiser’s Edge. This is dependant on your user settings so that you can either put in a constituent id, the first name followed by the surname or the surname comma the first name. While I was testing it on the sample database it worked perfectly. However when I tested it on a client’s very large database there were issues. Continue reading The Problem with Quick Find
Tag Archives: The Raiser’s Edge
Looking up a constituent
Whenever I write a bespoke customisation for a client that needs to look up a constituent based on some biographical information I normally use the functionality available behind the scenes in IDLookup. If you are unfamiliar with IDLookup, it allows users to feed in an Excel or CSV file of names, addresses, aliases, attributes and all sorts of biographical information. Then based on criteria that you define, it will look to see if one or more constituents already exist in The Raiser’s Edge. I use much of the look-up functionality in other projects simply because Blackbaud chose not to make this functionality easily available. There is no back-end interface to their regular constituent look-up screen which is a real shame. The nearest feature is the IBBRecordFinder interface.
The Raiser’s Edge VBA – Starting out
I received a question recently from Markus asking for help. He was new to developing code with the VBA module in The Raiser’s Edge and had a good idea but didn’t know how to make it work
How many unique IDs should a Raiser’s Edge Consituent have?
Normally when we look up at a Raiser’s Edge constituent we use a variety of identifiers to find the specific record we are looking for. It may be that we are using biographical data such as surname, first name and parts of their address. To find a one unique record we need to search by unique identifier. The most obvious that we think of is the constituent Id. This is the most common unique Id available to us on the constituent search screen. Of course there is the national insurance number (also known as social security number in the US), and the membership Id (for those with the optional Membership module).
Continue reading How many unique IDs should a Raiser’s Edge Consituent have?
Accessing other parallel VBA DLLs in The Raiser’s Edge
One of the methods for writing VBA code that fires when, say a constituent is saved, is to write a VBA DLL. I have covered this previously so I won’t go into details in this post. However what do you do if you need one VBA DLL to talk to another one? For example if I make a change to a record in one VBA DLL and have installed Zeidman Development’s Audit Trail application (excuse me for the gratuitous plug there) how do I tell the audit trail to make a note of this change? The VBA events are only fired when the Raiser’s Edge GUI opens up or saves a record and not when the code does so.
Continue reading Accessing other parallel VBA DLLs in The Raiser’s Edge
Raiser’s Edge Book
I have just seen a new book about to be released called:
Fundraising with the Raiser’s Edge: A Non-Technical Guide by Bill Connors. Bill was my first inspiration to go into business with The Raiser’s Edge when he was a consultant at Blackbaud and visited the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco where I worked at the time. He really inspired me to take my development work further. I have never met anyone with a better knowledge of The Raiser’s Edge and fundraising combined and no doubt this will be reflected in his book.
or
Most definitely a recommended read.
Small improvements that I like about Blackbaud Enterprise CRM
Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (eCRM or BBEC as it seems to be called interchangeably) is enormous. It is a big change to The Raiser’s Edge but then that is not surprising as it is not actually the replacement for The Raiser’s Edge 7. It is an application way beyond RE 7. Nevertheless you cannot help comparing the two as long as there is no RE8 to compare to. As a software developer it is a whole new paradigm. Of course even if you know how to develop software customisations for BBEC you still need to know how the program works from a user perspective. That is why I am not only learning a new development environment but I am learning a whole new program. Some of the concepts are very similar, some are different. As I learn I have come across some quite small changes that, for whatever reason, fill me with a “wow that’s great” feeling. These are not earth shattering improvements but just things that I am sure people will appreciate. So this post is dedicated to the small differences. Continue reading Small improvements that I like about Blackbaud Enterprise CRM
Replacing Excel
Most of the Raiser’s Edge users that I speak to complain that Blackbaud only offers CSV and tab delimited files as a way of importing data. They say that this is very limiting, that CSV can be unwieldy to work with outside of The Raiser’s Edge. They are also very pleased to hear that any customisation that I write allows them to import from Excel and also writes reports to Excel too. Excel offers so much functionality to prepare your data. However there are problems working with the Excel object model from within the API Continue reading Replacing Excel
Recurring Gift Schedules
One of the harder imports that you may have to do in The Raiser’s Edge is importing recurring gifts with schedules. The regular help file itself suggests itself that it is tricky but then unfortunately does not offer any examples. Writing code to create various schedules is equally as difficult if not harder. This post does apply to pledges with schedules but, here in the UK, recurring gifts are much more common than pledges with schedules so I will concentrate on that but the same principles apply. I have also noticed that there are more and more people developing in C# so this is for them (but is not that hard to translate to VB.NET) Continue reading Recurring Gift Schedules
Download The Raiser’s Edge for Free…
Well that is what many visitors to this site and Zeidman.info (especially the downloads area) seem to think. When I look at my stats and see the various visitors to my site almost every day I get somebody who is looking for The Raiser’s Edge and looking to download it for free. What is surprising is that these requests, mainly via Google, come not only from US and UK but from all over the world. I really never knew that there was such interest in The Raiser’s Edge in such far away places as Latvia, Turkey, Australia, Iran, India, Bolivia, Pakistan and Thailand to name just a few. Of some of the more obscure searches that lead people to my sites include:
and my favourite:
And some more common ones…
Despite all this there are very many serious requests for information about The Raiser’s Edge API and it I am genuinely glad to have been of help.
If you do want to some Blackbaud software for free why not try BlackbaudNow or ETapestry?