Subscribe to one of the following to hear about the next animation:
Zeidman Development on LinkedIn
Zeidman Development on Google+
Zeidman Development on Facebook
Category Archives: Not Code
The Mergician for The Raiser’s Edge – an Animation
Subscribe to one of the following to hear about the next animation:
Zeidman Development on LinkedIn
Zeidman Development on Google+
Zeidman Development on Facebook
What Should You Consider When Users Leave? (an additional thought to Blackbaud’s post)
I like BlackbaudKnowHow. The blog that consists of many articles on best practise within Blackbaud’s products often inspires me. The posts are written by a lot of different people at Blackbaud with a lot of experience in Blackbaud products. One post written recently, What Should You Consider When Users Leave?, highlighted what users of The Raiser’s Edge should do when one of their users leaves. (Update Sep 2020 – BlackbaudKnowHow is no longer active. A similar article can be found here)
One issue it does not cover (there are probably many more that were beyond the scope of the article) was what to do about action reminders that have been assigned to a user. The article suggests either deleting the user or changing their name, giving them prefix of “X”. Neither of these solutions help when a user has actions reminders associated with them.
It is possible to go in and change the assignments one by one. It is also very easy to miss them too. It is quiet easy to see what could happen if you miss a reassignment. A major donor who was due to be reminded about their donation is now forgotten about because the reminder instead of going to David goes to “XDavid” who is not longer at your organisation.
Our free plug-in Action Reminder Updater helps solve this problem. Select a soon-to-be ex-user and select a replacement user. Press start and all of the actions will be reassigned to the replacement user. Simple.
Flexible dedupe of The Raiser’s Edge database with IDLookup Dedupe
We are really pleased to announce IDLookup Dedupe. You can now take the power of IDLookup and apply it to the whole or part of your database. We have known for a while now that many IDLookup users dedupe their database with IDLookup. They export their whole database to Excel and then run IDLookup through it. Now the process got a whole lot simpler. Just select a query of records to dedupe (you can set up the query to run over the whole database) select your criteria sets, select your custom output fields and press start. Depending on the size of your database and the number of criteria sets IDLookup Dedupe will produce an output file of duplicate records in no time, ok it will probably take a while but it will be worth it!
The output format is then able to feed straight into The Mergician so that you can global merge records based on your duplicate file.
Not so that those who use The Mergician feel left out, we have also added the custom output format to The Mergician too. You can now add almost any field on the constituent record to the output and compare each record on a separate row.
IDLookup is an extra module for IDLookup at no extra cost to those on maintenance.
Oh and if you have not already done so vote for Chimpegration for the Digital Fundraising Awards (no email or registration required)
Chimpegration shortlisted for a Digital Fundraising Award – Vote for us
Chimpegration, our plug-in that integrates Blackbaud’s The Raiser’s Edge and MailChimp has been shortlisted for a Digital Fundraising Award. We are really excited about this. So many organisations are using both The Raiser’s Edge and MailChimp and can now integrate the two for free with Chimpegration.
Vote now and tell all your friends and colleagues to vote too for Chimpegration!
http://www.digitalfundraisingawards.co.uk/digitaltool
The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with Gmail… A series of case studies (1)
This is the first in a series of case studies looking at custom integration of Blackbaud products.
Unlike very many of our previous third party integration application the main driving force behind this application, Biographica, was the fact that we could do it. We did not have any particular client knocking on our door asking us link the two products and Google , funnily enough, did not approach us either asking us to develop an integration between The Raiser’s Edge and Gmail.
Continue reading The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with Gmail… A series of case studies (1)
IDLookup Search
I am really excited to release this new version of IDLookup which contains a major new component: IDLookup Search. This allows users to bring the power of IDLookup into day-to-day searching, with a large variety of search fields for looking up constituents on the fly (including those organisations who have yet to upgrade to RE7.92). It also lets you have complete control over your search results using IDLookup’s powerful criteria sets so you can decide how tight your search should be and tweak results based on your business rules.
We think that the new search functionality in 7.92 is really good. We also know that there are some people who have complained that they are not able to control exactly how records are searched. Also there are a load of organizations that, for whatever reason, are unable to upgrade currently to 7.92. This solution gives them the power of IDLookup but for day to day searches.
Check out the screencast for a better overview of how it works.
Release of Biographica – Integrating The Raiser’s Edge and GMail
We are really excited to release Biographica. This application integrates The RAiser’s Edge with Gmail (or Google Apps). This means that from within your Gmail inbox you can see details of a supporter as their email arrives. At the current time we show the biographical details (name, address, email and phone), constituent code, solicitor/canvasser, a gift summary and recently attended events. We only show this information if it is available for the constituent (so we don’t leave a lot of blank headers and take up a lot of space). Check out the product and view the screencast on our Zeidman Development site: http://www.zeidman.info/Integration/biographica.php
Continue reading Release of Biographica – Integrating The Raiser’s Edge and GMail
Introducing RETweet Professional for The Raiser’s Edge
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.
MailChimp Offers Non-Profit guides – Works well with Chimpegration
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