Raiser's Edge Mobile Application Update
We've been using the app for a bit. We're really in the newbie phase, but I still think it is a great offering. Here is the latest update I received by email from Leah Tomaino at Blackbaud:

Hello RE Mobile Charter and Controlled Release Customers!

We wanted to give you two important bits of information:

·         What we’ve changed based on your feedback, and when you’ll see those changes

·         Notification of a short, planned outage this afternoon

Short outage this afternoon.

We are doing some backend work that will require us to pause mobile services on our side.  This should only take a few hours.  Please pass this on to anyone using the RE Mobile app at your organization.

Changes for the official release of Raiser’s Edge Mobile

The far more exciting news is what we’ve heard from you and what we’re doing with that feedback!

·         We heard you wanted us to handle licensing more gracefully and make it easier to log out of RE Mobile app.   We’re taking a big step in that direction by enabling auto log-out from the mobile app when a user signs into RE proper.

·         We heard that you wanted to be able to see giving score queries in lists.  Done!

·         We heard that you needed to be able to see inactive records in the app.  Done!

·         We heard that if you have action fields required in RE that aren’t available in the app, you would prefer to be able to enter actions without those fields instead of not being able to add the actions at all.  Done!

·         We heard that notes entered through RE Mobile weren’t as easy to identify as you’d like them to be.   We are updating note titles to be Mobile specific. 

·         We heard Year-to-date (YTD) giving totals weren’t aligned with your fiscal year.  We are going to change the YTD calculation from a calendar year calculation to a fiscal year calculation.

There are some requests that we heard from you that we are investigating further, but will need some additional time and information to incorporate.  If you gave us feedback in these areas we may be reaching out to you to get further information or talk to you about participating in discovery as we consider if/how we build out this functionality.

·         Ability to view org records

·         Ability to view module information (membership, events, alumni)

·         Ability to manage events

I also want to mention the bugs we are fixing.    These weren’t about the design of the app, but were bumps in the road that some of you encountered along the way.  Thank you for your patience with us as we worked through these issues:

·         Windows Auth users will now log on with their usual network login—no more having to include the domain name/ in the username field.

·         International customers will see their correct currency symbols instead of all currencies showing with $.

·         Actions and notes that were truncating have been fixed.  You will be able to scroll through results that don’t fit on the screen as would be expected.

·         Emails that were missing will now be available.   We corrected the issue by ensuring that all phone types designated as emails in Configuration will show up regardless of what they’re named (email, e-mail, E mail, etc.)

·         All known timeout issues have been resolved

When can you get all these changes?

We will officially release Raiser’s Edge Mobile this Tuesday, September 18^th.    Changes to the app will be pushed through automatically, but there will be an RE patch and a web service update that you will have to load before seeing all the changes, including the license release change.  When everyone receives the release announcement on Tuesday, there will be update instructions.  Patch 5 will be available for on-premise customers at that time and, if all goes as planned, hosted customers will be updated to patch 5 during the Tuesday evening maintenance window.    Any changes to these plans will be included in Tuesday’s announcement.

Thank you so much to each of you who took the time to pick up the phone and call us, fill out a survey, or shoot us an email.    We really appreciated hearing from you, and appreciated knowing how we could improve your experience with RE Mobile.    We hope that your experience in the Charter/Controlled Release program was a positive one.   If you would like to be included in other programs going forward, for any of our products or have any additional feedback please let me know.

Best wishes,

Leah Tomaino

In Market Learning- Product Management More on the Mobile RE app

FAF: How far can we go?

I can honestly say that Sphere Friends Asking Friends came along at exactly the right time for us. We had used Net Community's Team Fundraising for a year. Now I really like BBNC; however, the team fundraising just didn't work well for our 'thon' events. Our major issues were the synchronization (which left us never knowing our real event totals), the reporting (or should I say "lack of") and the general confusion of our constituency/users.

So, when I heard that Blackbaud acquired Kintera, I was a happy camper. I got approval for the move and signed up right away. It's been all good for us from that point forward. The first, most obvious benefit was the lack of emails and phone calls from our participants. They got it - they could use the application and it made sense. We were hosting 7 walks on our FAF site. We immediately noticed we were getting a lot more donations online. Setup was pretty easy and the reporting was huge improvement.

Our next step was to begin an email campaign that started with our past walkers, continued through the participant signups and the fundraising efforts, and ended with the outstanding results shared with all. We added Boundless Fundraising so our participants could use social media to improve their fundraising efforts. Our staff began posting to Facebook and Twitter sharing our upcoming walks. And most recently, we worked with Blackbaud to add the Essentials package to make our site even more friendly and appealing.

Sphere Friends Asking Friends has really worked for us. So much so, that we are now looking at using it for a third party event venture. We're in the feasibility stage of the project so its early times yet, but I have high hopes. If we move forward, I'll post the process here. Stay tuned and good fundraising to all!

I love Import-O-Matic!

As you know if you read this blog, we use Sphere FAF extensively. We have at least 7 walks a year as well as an assortment of other thon type events. The FAF/RE plugin worked great, but it brought in a lot of data we didn't need in RE and processing profile updates was a pain! Our thoughts are that FAF is our walk database. The thon donors really have a loyalty to the person they support not necessarily to us. We don't solicit them in the same manner that we do our other donors. We email them through Sphere. We do want the donations in RE however.

We implemented Import-O-Matic (IOM) and now we bring in only what we need and we have a tool that does so much more on import. For example, those pesky little entries that are all in caps or not capitalized where they should be - IOM fixes the entries on the fly. I have dictionaries set up to correct things like Capt where I want Captain. I apply the correct letter type by associating it in a dictionary to the payment type. I can merge records during import - yes, during import. I could go on and on but I just want you to know that it has cut our processing time for getting those gifts in RE dramatically. We never could stay up to date on all of our donations - we do now. If you bring in lots of gifts from FAF, you will love IOM.

We're moving right along with Papersave. We are starting to see some good benefit. It's really nice to be able to open up a gift and see the documentation right there. Our process is refined and working well. We have 2 gift processors (they do so much more) and I ended up setting up a series of queues for each person. They alternate the daily scans. We use a ticketing system so they set up tickets for each day's tasks. Here is an example:

Daily Mail * Scanned and Sent to Queues * Fast Tracks done * Tape Made * Credit Cards processed same day as scanning * Gifts entered, Blackouts done, Documents attached and committed into RE * Gifts entered into Sphere * Tributes pulled, reviewed and sent out * TY acknowledgments pulled (letters, envelopes and postcards), printed and given to Mary with printed out documents for each gift Sphere * Gifts imported into Batch * Any documents from Daily Mail Blacked out and attached * Sphere batches committed * TY acknowledgments pulled (letters, envelopes and postcards), printed and given to Mary with printed out documents for each gift Net Community * Gifts downloaded from plugin and sent to Batch * NC batches committed * Tributes pulled, reviewed and sent out * TY acknowledgments pulled (letters, envelopes and postcards), printed and given to Mary with printed out documents for each gift Balancing After all gifts entered into RE * Pull report to Balance the whole Day * Pull report to Balance Sphere to RE * *Sphere includes ALS Express, Walk and Mackler Process is everything. We are extremely process oriented and document everything on our intranet. I will begin blogging on how we do that in future posts. Well, off to the conference on Saturday. I am so looking forward to it. I'm not presenting, video-taping or anything else. I do want to network and visit all the booths and get to as many presentations as possible. I hope to meet up with some fellow BB users on the weekend. Hope to see you all there too. Bye for now - Nora