It is finally here – Chimpegration. Integration between The Raiser’s Edge and MailChimp. With our free customisation you can export your email addresses directly from The Raiser’s Edge into your MailChimp lists, populating your merge variables in one automated process. Raiser’s Edge users have always been used to creating Word mail merges so that they can create sophisticated merge documents. Now they can do the same with email. Once the email campaign has been sent you can manage any bounces or unsubscribes directly from The Raiser’s Edge. Not only that, you can also add an action, appeal or attribute to any constituent with an email that was sent the campaign.

All that for free!

If you want more then we also offer a (paid for) Professional version appropriately called “Chimpegration Professional”. This allows you to synchronise activity between the two systems. This means that you can make use of MailChimp’s own forms to allow you users to update their own information. It then feeds back into The Raiser’s Edge. Equally any information you update in RE will feed back into MailChimp. Don’t worry, the review screen gives you complete control over which information is moved where. Also with this version you are able to see each constituent’s activity directly from the constituent record. See when they were sent the email, when they opened it and what they clicked on.

I was very pleased to have won a MailChimp integration fund award to integrate The Raiser’s Edge with MailChimp. It is such a great product and the possibilities for integration were enormous. The Raiser’s Edge manages donors really well but it never really made it into the world of email marketing. Of course there is integration with Outlook but that is not good enough when you need to send out thousands of newsletters. NetMail was a good start but their template design functionality was so limited. NetCommunity was better still but even with that product there are too many compromises (and it costs too). There are a lot of different email marketing applications out there but I have been using MailChimp for a while myself as part of my website newsletter. It has great functionality but I would never have used it if it had not been for two things; it is free for smaller volume users and it has a great API. Things could have been so different. Before looking at MailChimp I applied to get a developer licence at ConstantContact. I had to fill out a form and justify my use of it. I did that but they never even got back to me.

Chimpegration – Free

MailChimp – Free

Email marketing – now Free!

It is that time of year again. This year I shall again be speaking at the Blackbaud conference in Washington DC and in London a week later.  This year my session will look at whether we really should customise our databases. The discussion will centre around The Raiser’s Edge and around Blackbaud Enterprise CRM. What are the main reasons for customising the software? How do you go about it? What sort of things should you look out for? In the end will it really be worth it?

In Washington I shall be speaking Monday at 2.30pm in Chesapeake 3. In London I shall be speaking at 12.20pm in Edward 5&6.

There are lots of questions and hopefully my session will answer many of the questions and if not then enable you to find your own answers. Sometimes the hardest part of the process is knowing which questions to ask.

I would love to meet up with everybody. Last year in DC one of the complaints was that it was so hard to find anybody. I did contemplate coming the the conference in fancy dress – everyone would surely be able to find me then! A pirate? A cowboy, An alien? Anyway I am not sure that I would get through immigration so easily. I will be coming as myself (see here for a mug shot) but will be setting aside some time where I will sit in the main atrium at the conference centre. Follow my twitter feed @zeiddev for exact details of where I am.

Our new website is coming soon. Over on the main Zeidman Development site there are big changes going on behind the scenes. I like the look of our existing site. It is clean and simple. However it does look a bit early 2000s so we felt it was time for a freshen up.

We looked into a CMS but we are far too hardcore for that so we just went and built everything from scratch. Almost everything you will see on the website is down to our coding skills (hopefully I am doing ourselves justice here).

I was never very satisfied with the way in which you always had to “register” each time you wanted to download a plug-in. Well now you will only have to register once and can log into your account to download instead. What is more you will be able to see your download history, and see if you have the latest version of a plug-in or if there is a new one to be downloaded. If you have purchased a licence for a product then you will see your licence and maintenance details.

Everyone who has previously registered on the site has an account. You will need to reset your password in order to log in for the first time.

Don’t rush over as we are not going live until we are satisfied that everything is ready! (hopefully towards the beginning of next week).

If you recognise the title of this post then I was inspired by a BlackbaudKnowHow article of a similar name. In that article the author describes the differences between the three terms and how they relate to Blackbaud Enterprise CRM. This is a good overview and works well for Blackbaud Enterprise CRM. However it breaks down when talking about The Raiser’s Edge 7.

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I have been working with different bank checking software. Blackbaud Europe have written a plug-in for The Raiser’s Edge to update the bank record data such as the name and branch of the bank as well as the address based on the sort code. We recently developed a plug-in that processed the direct debit returns and unpaids from BACS and update the recurring gifts accordingly. In some cases a new bank would need to be created. I was asked to integrate the plug-in with their Blackbaud written plug-in.

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I was prompted to write this after seeing a tweet highlighting Altru’s history function. The tweet pointed to the Blackbaud Know How article about how you can see who changed what and when on a record. For those of you unfamiliar with Altru, it is one of the more recent applications released on the Infinity platform.

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I mentioned in a previous post how a service I was using to record screencast, ScreenToaster, dissappeared. When they dissappeared so did many of my screencasts. Well I am pleased to bring back to life Google Calendar Integration with The Raiser’s Edge and with Enterprise CRM.

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When I wrote an article a while back about the setting up a non-production database, I thought that I had the registry and how Blackbaud use it well understood. Of course that was before Vista, Windows 7 and elevated admin rights.

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UK Fundraising are reporting the release of  Zeidman Development’s latest release – Audit Trail Free. Nice to see the company in the NP Tech media (even if it was a press release – but still!)

Zeidman Development are pleased to announce the release (well re-release) of our Audit Trail customisation. The Audit Trail tracks changes made to records on The Raiser’s Edge. The three versions come in varying degrees of complexity.

Audit Trail Free – tracks constituent deletions and reports them to a log file

Audit Trail Basic – tracks constituent deletions, additions and updates and records them in a table that can be reported on, filter by, sliced and diced etc

Audit Trail Professional – does all of the above but also tracks gifts, relationships, actions and participants.

All three versions tell you who made the change and when. They also tell you the previous values and the updated values.

Audit Trail no longer requires the VBA module – so the free version is truly free!

Check out an overview video. Warning –  it’s cute.

For more information including a breakdown in the differences between the versions and to download Audit Trail check out the product page on our website