All posts by David Zeidman

Blackbaud Conference Sessions to Watch out for #bbcon

Not Code, Opinion, , ,

It seems like a time honoured tradition of existing speakers telling others which sessions at the Blackbaud Conference  (BBCon) they should look out for. There is Heller Consulting’s, Joe Matic’s ( take his advice with caution – he is, after all, a robot) and, um, others. (Feel free to add them to the comments.)

I have now attended five conferences in the US and three in the UK. What do I look for in a good session? Well quite often the speaker is key. If they are not engaging then however interesting the topic , it will be lost on the audience. That being said some topics just shouldn’t be missed. (You can always moan about the speaker afterwards!)

So in no particular order (other than my two are going first as this is my blog and I am allowed to throw impartiality out the window), here is my choice of great speakers and sessions to look out for.

 

Performance Management using Audit Trail – David Zeidman and Mohammed Dasser

Have you ever wondered how you could use Audit Trail to measure your organization’s performance entering accurate data? You may wonder what records are being entered the most or how many different people are entering data onto a specific area. David will give a little background to Audit Trail and Mohammed will show you how University of Central Florida have created various metrics to report on performance. This is not going to be a sale pitch for Audit Trail (come to the Zeidman Development booth for that) .

Raiser’s Edge Geek Forum 2: The Revenge – Ed Hohlbein, Melissa Graves, Kirk Schmidt, Bill Connors and David Zeidman

There are very many different ways of using The Raiser’s Edge. If you went to the session last year you would have seen 5 Raiser’s Edge experts from three different countries, discussing / arguing about best practises. If you have a burning question about how some aspect of The Raiser’s Edge should best be done then don’t expect one straight answer! The panel will debate different solutions based on your questions.

Real-Time Integration Between The Raiser’s Edge and the Cloud – Jonathan Puddle

Now more than ever the digital and technology world is moving to the cloud. There are many definitions of “cloud” but any technology that doesn’t connect through traditional solutions (same network, etc) requires new solutions. I have done some work with Jonathan in the past and know that some of the things that Catch The Fire have done with their various systems are quite remarkable and well worth hearing about.

Social Media Police: Nonprofit Edition – Allyson Kapin, Maddie Grant, Melanie Mathos

I have seen Melanie speak about nonprofit social media on numerous occasions and in previous BBCons she has spoken with Chad Norman in a session that went on to become a book – 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits. It does not sound like this session is going to follow the same format but nevertheless it certainly sounds like this is one to watch. Social Media changes rapidly and keeping on top of the latest changes is a must. (Then you can implement them with the book!)

Infinity Platform Features and the Software Development Kit – Ben Lambert

I am a big sucker for the Infinity platform and Ben always does it good justice. It is a great environment to work with and with each version release there are always some really interesting things added. I will be watching this one closely to see what new tricks Ben has up his sleeve.

How Would you Enter THIS Gift? – Bill Connors

I have known Bill for many years. He could talk about anything and make it interesting and dynamic. However this time he is talking about gifts! And who doesn’t like a gift? Well if that gift is sent in by a known donor, from an offshore company, signed off by his spouse and as a tribute to their gardener’s special birthday, would you know how to enter it into RE and in such a way as making it reportable too?

The Raiser’s Edge Roadmap – Tom Maszk and Emily Dalton

This is an annual favourite. Tom and Emily are going to be revealing the latest greatest additions to The Raiser’s Edge. We are told that many of those that made the cut were user requests so this is sure to be a crowd pleaser. I just hope that they have beefed up the security to take care of those people who were less than pleased about their own suggestions (Yes, when will The Mergician, Validatrix and Audit Trail be added as standard RE functionality!!?)

 

Well those are my top picks. Sorry if I overlooked anybody but I am sure you will appear on somebody else’s list. Look forward to seeing you all there!

Validatrix – Complex Business Rules with ease for The Raiser’s Edge

Not Code, , ,

I am really pleased to announce that we have released our latest plugin – Validatrix. (Or jump to the fancy animation). It always bothered me how so many business rules built into The Raiser’s Edge were arbitrary. You have to supply a surname but not an email address. You have to give a gift amount and date but not specify which segment it belonged to when given (as some organisations would do by adding an attribute).  It maybe that somebody is a VIP because they give over a certain amount of money or because they are a specific type of prospect or because they attended a VIP dinner. You cannot enforce these rules in The Raiser’s Edge as is. You can, however, with Validatrix.

Continue reading Validatrix – Complex Business Rules with ease for The Raiser’s Edge →

Payment Type or Payment Method ID reference

Intermediate, ,

Some time ago I wrote the mappings for gift type ids and their corresponding descriptions. This is useful in the API and also when interrogating the database directly. More recently I have needed to do the same thing with payment type. I find it very strange that in some scenarios this field is referred to payment type and other times it is payment or just pay method. Whichever you use the mappings are given below:

  Continue reading Payment Type or Payment Method ID reference →

Checking access restrictions in The Raiser’s Edge

Intermediate, ,

In a recent project I had to ensure that specific confidential information was being saved as an action. I had a custom screen where this data was going to be viewed and edited. Only certain users had access to that action using security by action types. I had to check to see if the current user was able to view the action and if they could whether or not they were able to edit the details. There are useful methods for this in the API and I assumed it would be a simple task to use them. Continue reading Checking access restrictions in The Raiser’s Edge →

Redesigning for mobile

Beginner

This is somewhat off topic but since this is my blog I reckon I can use a bit of poetic licence. I have been updating the main zeidman.info website so that it can be used easily on mobile. Everybody talks about the percentage of visitors coming from mobile platforms as having increased and will certainly increase over time.  When you have a good smartphone you do look at sites much more on the web. Having recently (within the last two years at least) redesigned our website I was somewhat reluctant to do it all over again. The homepage sort of worked for mobile. There were three large icons that could easily be clicked on to get into the site. However the rest of the site was far from optimised.

Continue reading Redesigning for mobile →

Raiser’s Edge, PCI Compliance and the Dreaded, Buggy Lock Screen

Not Code, Opinion

There were a lot of complaints when in version 7.91 (?) of The Raiser’s Edge a major new feature was PCI compliance including a lock screen. Firstly there were issues with long running processes, global changes, imports and customisations also locking up and not continuing. There were many people who said “why?”. We don’t store credit cards and have no intention of doing so. Some of the security additions were very welcome. The previous password policy (nothing larger than 8 characters, no minimum and the ability for supervisor uses to reveal the password in security) was terrible. Even the policy of forcing users to change their password after a certain time, while annoying for the user, is an industry standard and can also be turned off.

However the lock screen is my pet peeve. I am somewhat of a different type of RE user. I am not a fundraiser (despite the many LinkedIn endorsements – thank you). I am a software developer. As a software developer I care very little for PCI compliance. Most if not all of my constituents are fictional. And yet I have no opportunity to turn off the lock screen. Most organisations that are careful about security will enforce a group policy Windows lock so that after a few minutes of Windows inactivity the screensaver comes on and returns to the password screen. Again this is a sensible precaution. As a small business I have Sage accounting software which is PCI compliant. It does not lock out.

My latest issue is that RE locks, I unlock it, it opens RE only to lock again. Or it locks, I unlock it, it opens and then something locks again. RE is open but the lock screen appears in front of it. I unlock it and, because there is not actually anything to unlock, it crashes. I don’t know what is going on but this is very annoying.

Come on Blackbaud, make the lock screen optional for all users. Not just those with non-supervisor rights (or with Windows Authentication)!

 

EDIT

It has come to my attention that I am probably in a minority position here. I regularly have a development environment open with programs that are attached to RE. This may or may not be a cause of the problem. I don’t know. I know that RE crashes when I unlock it even if I don’t have external programs attached to it. I have not been told specifically of this happening to other people so it is unfair to say that it is buggy. (By all means feel free to share your experiences in the comments). The point is I believe that the lock screen is overkill.

An upgrade to The Mergician

Not Code, ,

I am really pleased to announce an update to The Mergician that will help all UK users of The Mergician.

Previously whenever you have merged two constituents with Gift Aid Declarations the value of in the source field on the GAD has not been transferred across to the merged record.

We now do this automatically for you whenever you select to merge Gift Aid Declarations. We know how much of a pain this has been in the past where you have had to do this manually.

The Mergician is not just a global merging tool. It cleans up after the merge too where The Raiser’s Edge merge tool leaves unfinished business. The addition of the source code field being copied over adds to the feature set of The Mergician that we hope you all appreciate. Of course if you have any suggestions of improvements then we would be happy to hear them.

The upgrade to version 1.8 is available after logging into your ZeidZone account on zeidman.info for all those organisations on a maintenance plan.

Batch API – error with tempRecords is nothing

Intermediate,

“Nothing :
Init method must be called before using this object.” My colleague was testing a new application that I have written for a client. Every so often she would tell me that this error message was appearing in the control report. Everything else appeared to work. Just what did this mean? It was one of those classic RE error messages that means nothing. When I started to debug the problem I saw the error quite soon. Again it was one of those Batch API idiosyncrasies that just needed to be dealt with.

I was creating several gifts in a batch. I was looping through the gifts and creating each one.

For Each donation In donations
    tempRecords = CType(batch.TempRecords, Blackbaud.PIA.RE7.BatchData.CTempRecords)
    PopulateOneGift(constitSysId, batch, tempRecords.Add, donation)
    tempRecords.Save()
 Next

The error occurred on the second iteration of the loop. Whenever the tempRecords.Add
was called the error was raised. This was strange because normally you get this kind of error when you have not initialized the object or done a Closedown on it. Anyway the solution to add one line before calling the Add:

For Each donation In donations
    tempRecords = CType(batch.TempRecords, Blackbaud.PIA.RE7.BatchData.CTempRecords)
    tempRecords.Reload()
    PopulateOneGift(constitSysId, batch, tempRecords.Add, donation)
    tempRecords.Save()
 Next

That seemed to fix the problem.

EDIT: or so I thought. It appears as though it worked once then failed after that. I have now resorted to saving and closing the batch after each iteration and then opening it up again at the beginning. Ah the joys of the batch API.

Contactegration – An Integration between The Raiser’s Edge and Constant Contact

Beginner

We are really excited to release Contactegration. Ever since we released Chimpegration we have been bombarded with people asking us to integrate other email packages. One of the most common requests was between The Raisers Edge and Constant Contact.

The functionality is similar to Chimpegration but not exactly the same. The two APIs differ somewhat so it was difficult to reproduce exactly the same functionality. However we are very close. You can export your email addresses and merge variables to Constant Contact and you can manage the bounced emails, the unsubscribes and everyone that the email was sent to so that you update the constituent record in the same way.

One new piece of functionality that came to Chimpegration with the release of Contactegration was the ability in both applications to remove subscribers who were not part of a particular query. This is perfect for membership organisations that steer their lists from RE and want to remove subscribers who are no longer have a particular membership.

Unfortunately we are also not able to offer a free version of Contactegation. This was something we were hoping to be able to do but for reasons beyond our control we are not able to do so.

If you are interested then take Contactegration for a test drive and let us know what you think.

The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with HubSpot… A series of case studies (3)

Beginner, , , ,

Our integration with HubSpot came about because they thought it would be a great idea. Well who wouldn’t think it a good idea to integrate with The Raiser’s Edge. HubSpot said that they had a number clients who use both systems and being able to transfer data from HubSpot back into The Raiser’s Edge would make both systems work better together.

Continue reading The Raiser’s Edge Integrated with HubSpot… A series of case studies (3) →