Under the weather but gearing up for the first PBUG meeting

Sorry I didn't come back as quickly as I hoped. I've been a little under the weather.

I want to post a little bit about our journey through the implementation of Blackbaud products, but I also want to make mention of a new user group we are trying to get started in Philly. There are a few of us who have been trying to get together to share ideas and questions. Well, we're finally getting it moving along. The first meeting of the Philadelphia Blackbaud Users Group will be on September 3d in Ambler, PA. Please check out more info at http://www.alsphiladelphia.org/NetCommunity/Pbug. If you are in the area - I hope to see you there.

Now - on to our journey.... this is just an outline...I'll cover specifics in later posts.

It began with Financial Edge which was actually implemented before I came to The ALS Association, Greater Philadelphia Chapter. When I started here in 2002, I was asked to settle on a solution for a fundraising application and transfer all of the data from our Access database to this solution. We chose Raiser's Edge and used Blackbaud to help implement and transfer data. Great success!

After Raiser's Edge (RE), we then added on The Researcher's Edge (TRE). This prospect management tool really opened our eyes to some potential donors we never even considered before.

At this point, we had FE and RE integrated and TRE left not integrated though we did transfer in rating scores. We were using an independent programming group to build our website and online donor tools. We had just started using Convio for our walks. We wanted to integrate our online giving with RE so we didn't have to do double data entry. We added Net Solutions and used this application on our website. Now most of our donations were coming into RE. We could do email blasts, registrations - we felt good.

We still could not integrate Convio. We had a three year contract and there had been many mumblings and grumblings about Convio's support, difficult backend and reporting. We reviewed the process to integrate Convio with RE and found it too cumbersome. We wanted to update our website and take control. We wanted to make the changes. So we moved to Net Community (BBNC).

BBNC gave us control over changes, offered online giving, registration, targeted content and lots of good stuff. It had a little learning curve, but fortunately we have a person who understood it well. Now our giving and registrations were integrated with RE and we were going to move our walks to team fundraising in BBNC.

We ran the walks for a year in BBNC team fundraising. For us, it just wasn't working the way we wanted it to work - or should I say the way our walkers and their supporters wanted it to work. They let us know that they missed the clear path to registration offered in Convio, but we sure didn't miss the issues we had and didn't want to go back. When Blackbaud purchased Kintera, we had our solution. This year we implemented Sphere Friends Asking Friends.

This was just the right solution for us. The front end we liked, simple and typical of a team fundraising application. The back end we love - reporting galore. And we are now integrated so our donations come into RE. Next we are bringing up an online e-store in Sphere.

This is why I named this blog - All Things Blackbaud. I'm no expert, but I'm fortunate to have been part of all of the implementations since RE. I get to play server admin too so I have some understanding of the hardware side. I often get calls from people wanting to know why we use these products, how we implemented them and how we use them. We're a small nonprofit typical of many out there. I hope I can share some info with some of you that you might find interesting. If not, I have fun just talking about tech stuff - what a geek I am.