At the end of last year we released RETweet for all our newsletter subscribers (sign up to receive future offers and news). It was a great success allowing you to see your constituents’ Twitter feed directly from within The Raiser’s Edge. Now, with the release of RETweet Professional, you can search for any keyword, user or hashtag just as you would in Twitter. RETweet Professional brings you all the features of RETweet but also allows you to find out who is talking about your organisation and your mission. From the feed, RETweet Professional will look up the constituents using a fuzzy search ^[1], allow you create you own constituent if it cannot find it or you can search in RE using the regular search screen. The application gives you the option of connecting a Twitter user to a constituent and once you have done that you can save their tweet as a notepad. You can also set up a “love” attribute for use within RETWeet Professional. You can assign a value directly from the application and it will save onto the constiteunt record without you having to open it up.

Track the conversation that people are having about your organisation directly from within The Raiser’s Edge. Social media has been brought one step closer to your organisation.

Download RETweet Professional Demo (includes RETweet)

^[1] On a technical note we are forced to do a fuzzy search as the only two identifying fields that we retrieve from Twitter are full name and location. We split up both of these fields into first and last name and city, state and country. For the location we attempt to see if the values we have assumed are in the code tables. If they are we know that we have assigned the values correctly. If they do not appear in the code tables then we do not assign the values on creating a constituent. When searching we give each term a weighting. Only constituents that match the last name or the first five characters of the organization name will ever appear in the fuzzy search results. After that each of the other terms’ weighting are added up to determine which results appear in the match. City and the full first name (as opposed to the person’s initial) are given a higher weighting so matches based on those values will appear more prominently.

At Zeidman Development we are big fans of MailChimp. We use it ourselves to send out our newsletters and we have integrated it with The Raiser’s Edge in the form of Chimpegration. MailChimp have now hired somebody to help non-profits make better use of MailChimp. Their latest blog post explains how to use merge variables in MailChimp.

Users of The Raiser’s Edge should be used to using merge variables given the built in tools that link RE to Word. The article explains how you use the corresponding functionality in MailChimp. What is really good is that if you set up merge variables in MailChimp you can easily link those variable to query output in Chimpegration. In the free version you are able to export your data to MailChimp and in the Pro version you can synchronize the data sets. That means you can use MailChimp merge variables as an online data source. If you tie it into your website, users can log in, update their merge variables themselves and all that is fed back into The Raiser’s Edge on synchronization. Sophisticated, flexible integration in one product.

For more information about Chimpegration take a look at our site: http://www.zeidman.info/downloads/chimpegration.php