RE/BBNC Integration

It's been a crazy time for me - selling a house, moving, sick for 3 weeks, etc etc. Anyway, I'd like to talk some about the integration between Raiser's Edge and Net Community. We implemented RE awhile ago. We moved from a Microsoft Access database to RE. It was a really smooth implementation due in great part to a wonderful technician at Blackbaud. She spent a great amount of time learning about the structure of the Access db and working with me to map out the conversion.

We brought in BBNC about 2 1/2 years ago. We host all of our applications in house. We moved form an hosted website for content management and Net Solutions to BBNC. For the most part it went well - team fundraising was a whole 'nother situation though. More on that another time.

Raiser's Edge is our key application - it's our view of all those linked to our organization. Over the years, we have had to change procedures and policies, but I can say that the initial choices we made have held strong.

A few notes on what was important to us:

• Campaigns, Funds and Appeals: you really need to have a good strategy here. We followed BB's description of what these mean and it works for us. Campaigns are that big umbrella- the overall look at your fundraising. Funds belong to your financial department, especially if you integrate with FE. Appeals are the ask - we have an appeal for every type of donation/gift that we get. We set up new campaigns, Funds and Appeals each year. Every gift gets and appeal. In the appeal, we have linked to a default campaign and fund most of the time. Sometimes an appeal can get gifts for different funds. For instance, our Unsolicited Appeal. This is used for gifts that come in with no indication of a defined "ask". The donor often indicates a fund - research, in-home care, etc.
• Talk to each other!!! When you set up RE for the first time, you should have had a lot of discussion with all the departments. A database does you no good if the people who use it don't get the info they need.
• Set up procedures and policies and document them.
• Keep your security as tight as your company allows. In another blog I'll talk about our security and processes. Most of our staff only has view rights for most things.
• Listen to Finance when they tell you they need all those funds. I made the mistake of trying to convince finance to put the money in "consolidated buckets". That didn't last long. Soon I realized that I had led them down the wrong road. After spending some time with the financial statements and budget in FE, I see that the Finance department knows the view of the funds that they have to show to the people who make decisions. We have lots of funds and that works for us. So my motto now is "the fund belongs to Finance".
  

Back to integration -
The integration for RE/FE is set up in RE. In Config/General Ledger, you make that connection to the server. In each fund, the Gift type is linked to the GL distribution. The fund links directly with the project in FE. Our finance department initiates setting up new funds. They set up the project code in FE and I set up the fund in RE. Then our finance lead puts in the GL distribution.

Each gift is marked Not Posted by default. This means the data hasn't been sent to FE. All of our gifts get posted to FE. If changes need to be made to the gift after it has been posted, we have to do an adjustment. This adjustment is then posted to FE. If we need to remove a gift, we don't delete it- we reduce it to $0 and post it to FE. This way we can note in the gift why it was reduced to $0.

I'll go into more detail on the actual posting process in the next blog. Integrating RE and FE brought lots of benefits:

• we don't do double data entry
• we have fewer mistakes
• we have a great audit trail
• we can drill down from FE right into RE
• our reporting is consistent across applications
• we have a similar interface on our products
• one vendor for questions
  
• we have a great set of checks and balances as gifts are moved through the systems

Obviously, you can see we like it. I would highly recommend this integration if your development group speaks to your finance group. That may sound strange, but it seems to be a big issue out there. Finance may think they are losing control and Development may think they have to configure things differently. It took us a little while to recognize that RE is for fundraising and FE is for finance. We would say - so where should we get that report? We've straightened that out. We did make the rule to use the fiscal year in RE for our appeals. It's easier remembering one type of year for both apps. We still spend time reinforcing the idea that reporting by appeal may show something different than reporting by fund in RE.

Next I'll go through the actual process of posting.

A little happy dance for our Phillies -