The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with Potentiality… A series of case studies (2)

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Towards the end of 2010 we started working with Potentiality to integrate their system with The Raiser’s Edge. At the time I knew very little about them and their products. Their headquarters is in Melbourne, Australia with an office in London. Even though they have an office in London our main contact was with their Melbourne office. Their product was a community based content management system (CMS) targeted towards schools and universities but also used by any organisation that was trying to build up a community of supporters.

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What Should You Consider When Users Leave? (an additional thought to Blackbaud’s post)

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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 (Update Sep 2020 – BlackbaudKnowHow is no longer active.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

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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.

Check out IDLookup

Check out The Mergician

 

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

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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)

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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.

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The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with… A series of case studies (Introduction)

Beginner

Over the years we have integrated The Raiser’s Edge with a number of different products. Some are for the wider community whereas others are for specific organisations. In this series of posts we shall be looking at how each third party application has been integrated with The Raiser’s Edge, what the challenges were, what made the project unique and what the consequences of the integration.

Each case is different. In some examples the vendor of the other product was directly involved in helping to shape the customisation. They may have sold it or bundled it as part of their application. In some case we decided to do the integration ourselves with no or little input from the vendor. Finally individual organisations were the driving force behind an integration.

We are firm believers in integration. Everybody is a winner. All of a sudden applications are no longer islands and can talk with other applications.  The definition of “talking” has also changed. Where it once meant an exchange of files it now means a direct interchange of data between the two applications without the need to save data in a file. The fewer steps the more efficient the process.

By highlighting some of the applications that we have worked with we hope to show just how much more productive work flows have become.

IDLookup Search

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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.