I have just seen a new book about to be released called:

Fundraising with the Raiser’s Edge: A Non-Technical Guide by Bill Connors. Bill was my first inspiration to go into business with The Raiser’s Edge when he was a consultant at Blackbaud and visited the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco where I worked at the time. He really inspired me to take my development work further. I have never met anyone with a better knowledge of The Raiser’s Edge and fundraising combined and no doubt this will be reflected in his book.

From Amazon.com

or

From Amazon.co.uk

Most definitely a recommended read.

Zeidman Development are pleased to announce a new customisation for Blackbaud Enterprise CRM. The bank validation customisation validates UK financial institutions and constituent accounts. For the financial institutions the branch name and address will also be updated. For the constituent accounts the account will be flagged as whether it is valid for direct debit processes. The customisation introduces the ability to query on constituent accounts and in doing so allows for them to be globally validated.

As this is on the Infinity platform it will most likely work for Raiser’s Edge 8 when it is released.

Check out the video at the link below for more details:

http://www.zeidman.info/downloads/BBECBankVal/BankValBBEC.html

Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (eCRM or BBEC as it seems to be called interchangeably) is enormous. It is a big change to The Raiser’s Edge but then that is not surprising as it is not actually the replacement for The Raiser’s Edge 7. It is an application way beyond RE 7. Nevertheless you cannot help comparing the two as long as there is no RE8 to compare to. As a software developer it is a whole new paradigm. Of course even if you know how to develop software customisations for BBEC you still need to know how the program works from a user perspective. That is why I am not only learning a new development environment but I am learning a whole new program. Some of the concepts are very similar, some are different. As I learn I have come across some quite small changes that, for whatever reason, fill me with a “wow that’s great” feeling. These are not earth shattering improvements but just things that I am sure people will appreciate. So this post is dedicated to the small differences. Read the rest of this entry »

I have just returned from day one of the Blackbaud’s 2009 Relationship Management Conference. For those of you who were at my presentation then thank you for coming. If you were not there or you did not get a USB drive then you can view the whole presentation on Zeidman Development at this link.

Most of the Raiser’s Edge users that I speak to complain that Blackbaud only offers CSV and tab delimited files as a way of importing data. They say that this is very limiting, that CSV can be unwieldy to work with outside of The Raiser’s Edge. They are also very pleased to hear that any customisation that I write allows them to import from Excel and also writes reports to Excel too. Excel offers so much functionality to prepare your data. However there are problems working with the Excel object model from within the API Read the rest of this entry »

Well that is what many visitors to this site and Zeidman.info (especially the downloads area) seem to think. When I look at my stats and see the various visitors to my site almost every day I get somebody who is looking for The Raiser’s Edge and looking to download it for free. What is surprising is that these requests, mainly via Google, come not only from US and UK but from all over the world. I really never knew that there was such interest in The Raiser’s Edge in such far away places as Latvia, Turkey, Australia, Iran, India, Bolivia, Pakistan and Thailand to name just a few. Of some of the more obscure searches that lead people to my sites include:

and my favourite:

And some more common ones…

Despite all this there are very many serious requests for information about The Raiser’s Edge API and it I am genuinely glad to have been of help.
If you do want to some Blackbaud software for free why not try BlackbaudNow or ETapestry?

There are more and more customisations in the plug-in directory (so much so that I am contemplating changing the name ).

Here are the top visited customisations from the “plug-in” directory during the month of May 2009.

Constituent Document Linker
Cleanup Notepad Types plug-in
Audit Trail
Code Insert Custom Part
Blackbaud NetCommunity Integration
ID Lookup
Consecutive Giving Total Search
Clean Static Queries
Bank Checker Solution
CanadianUpdateRE

If you cannot find a plug-in that you know should be in the directory or would like something developed then feel free to contact me at Zeidman Development.

I have been working on a project to bring in a large amount of data into The Raiser’s Edge. Everyone else on the project has been using SSIS to do this and previously I would probably have manipulated the data in Excel, Access or for the most complicated data written a small application to convert the data into the format that I wanted before importing it into RE. Having used SSIS for a day now I am say that I am converted!

Read the rest of this entry »

After dispelling the myth that you do not need to buy the Blackbaud API module for The Raiser’s Edge in order to work with customisations (you can run a plug-in), I usually get asked well what are the disadvantages of using a plug-in? I normally say that one of problems with a plug-in is that somebody has to press the “start” button. I recently found a solution to this. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of the work that I do involves the integration of third party products with The Raiser’s Edge. It is not always right to develop a custom application to perform this integration. There are many factors including the volume of data transfer, the complexity of data, how quickly the data needs to be integrated and of course what budget is available. This article attempts to outline the options available to Raiser’s Edge managers who need to integrate with non-Blackbaud products.

Read the rest of this entry »