We had a great user group meeting at The Philadelphia Art Museum in December. Join Philabug yahooo group to read about what went on. Our group now has 57 members - whoohoo! Our next meeting will be in March at the Horsham, PA library. All Blackbaud product users are welcome.
We implemented Terminal Server and my remote users are thanking me. We have an agreement with a great IT consulting group, Lantium, and they set it up for us. It's easy to use and really fast - loving it myself. Our only issue is with some licensing. I'm going to have to check to see if there are ts licenses for some of our software. All Blackbaud products work great. Our vmware move was a real benefit for us here as it was easy to set up another server.
We're taking on another FAF site. We will be hosting the ALS Express event on a separate FAF website. This year's event will go live very soon. FAF has really worked well for us. I speak with quite a few people as a referral source and I still think there is a lot of confusion as to what product to use when. I'm trying to get some guidance on that and hope to get a presentor for our next user group meeting. More to come on that in the future.
We're beginning our talks on how to handle our impressive amount of online donations. They bring their own issues especially with who is doing what. Normally, we have one person downloading all of our online transactions and processing them into batch. When we have two walks close together, we really suffer getting the downloads processed. The good news is that all the info on our online sites is the latest and greatest so we can get totals and reports and all that good stuff. We also e-receipt/thank all our online donors (except event registrants in BBNC) so acknowledgements are handled in a timely manner.
We have two full time gift processors. They handle all the daily mail/acknowledgements/tributes, etc. They are pushed during our very active walk season. We are heading into part 2 of that season now. I'll be posting here how our meetings go and what we decide to do.
F9 news - I'm starting to get pretty good at F9 in my very untrained manner. I'm thinking of splurging for official training, if not for me then for our controller who is ready to make the move to F9 for our financial reporting. I've set up most of our financial statements and love that I can just change the month and get a whole new report instantly - wow, very cool.
Next on my blog update will be the BBNC update to version 6.15. I've transitioned the database to the "cloud" (I'm still vague on this). This took about 3 hours for our database. It did not affect the site after the transition. During it, there may have been some slowdown. No complaints from anyone though. Wish me luck!
Nora
I'm adding on to this blog and changing the title. Never done that before and likely won't again, but is warranted here. Chalk it up to a bad week for me or just my tendency to want it all right now.... but I was mistaken by doubting the partnership between Blackbaud and Papersave. I've since seen a lot of effort between both companies to make sure that I understood what Papersave could offer and how Blackbaud could help make it happen. It looks like we will be moving forward with our Papersave implementation. We're in the final pricing phase and I'm excited. I've had great support from Holly Condon at Papersave and my account manager, Mary Lehman, at Blackbaud.
Going through this process has been so informative. It can be easy to look at Papersave as just a repository for scanned documents. It is so much more than that. I've talked to some other Papersave users and, across the board, they've spoken to how Papersave has changed the way the office manages important information related to their constituency and to the gifts.
As we worked through the feasibility of implementing Papersave, we came up with more reasons it would help us do our jobs better:
- we can allow people who need to make decisions, contact constituents, manage our major gift programs, etc. have easy access to documentation related to those constituents or their gifts
- when the auditors show up and ask for that documentation, we can use queries to pull the gifts and related docs - no digging around
- we continuously look for ways to streamline the process related to gift receipt, data entry, acknowledgements and tributes. We can set up a work flow process that allows us tasks to be accomplished more efficiently and let's us know where we are in the process
We're looking forward to seeing the product in action. I'll post here as we move through implementation (fingers crossed for final approval).
