Best Of
Re: Faculty Member Not Teaching This Term Can't View Past Classes
I think that anyone who is not assigned to teach current classes will not see the Classes menu. I don't think that's a change.
The Find more link in the Classes menu and the Groups menu lead to the same page. One option would be to add the person to an Activity group or Community group. That will give them the Groups menu and the Find more link.
Another option is for you to go to the classes that the teacher wants to see and copy the URL of the Bulletin board page. Just give the teacher the URLs.
Requirements
With all the recent testing I've been doing for Requirements, I'm now having a hard time figuring out if I published a Requirement into the Legacy portal versus the new portal. Does anyone have a solution for this?
Re: Donation Forms - Raffles
This is one article from the KB
How do I create a new event in The Raiser’s Edge
It will also show as last gift. Because of this we do not use RE webview for events. We use the last gift info for ask amounts in many appeals. Was told be support we could use filter to use different funds but that doesn't always work when event fund is one that also one that gets donations. And too much work to add that filtering along with all the others.
Re: Donation Forms - Raffles
You should also be aware that even if receipt amount is $0, the raffle ticket cost if you enter that as gift amount will pull in gift reports, life time giving, RE year-end statements, etc.
You might want to consider it as an event but enter $ figures in as a custom field if you do not want the full amount to be on records as a gift. Just a thought.
Re: Requirements - Issues with Deleting from the web and Publishing to the New Portal
Same here. We are experiencing issues with posting to the new portal. Last month when we went live, we deleted from web and published requirements due through the end of the year to the new portal. Some forms seemed to work fine but we have found others did not publish, even though we did not receive an error. Now with our continued testing, we seem unable to publish to a manual application at all. If we publish to existing, it's publishing back to the legacy portal. We are also frustrated with multiple open cases and no resolution.
Re: NXT Duplicate Management - Are you using it?
@Karen Diener This is the tool I'm talking about.
It's very different than the previous duplicate management tool in DBV, and has been created to be the replacement. However, some of the legacy fields that people are using may not merge correctly, so you are still limited to the DBV duplicate merging tool.
Re: Help with diploma setup
Hi @Sarah Herrick I am interested in your post because making use of the diploma set up, graduation requirements, and course requests is one of my new year's goals. BUT if I can't track requirements by grade level there is no point, we will just keep using paper since we are small enough. I hate to see us spending so much money on BB and not be able to use all the features!
Requirements
If I published a requirement to the new portal because of the original cutoff date was 8/31, can I now unpublish the requirement from the new portal and republish the requirement to the Legacy portal?
Re: Everyone has that one tool they can't live without - what's yours?
Power Automate, Importacular, and a second monitor :)
Re: Streamlining updates with custom connector?
A very good question you are asking, a question that many would have once they start building many reports out of Power BI.
Let me first start by saying, this part is more of an Art and it is Science.
So let me start with what my setup is, my thought process, and then maybe you can get some idea on how you want to go forward with yours.
I use Azure SQL data warehouse (this is better than using the Blackbaud custom connector for Power BI) but not for reason you are asking your question about. I pull data from the data warehouse. I do not have ONE Power BI data source, I have many, but this all depends on the report I'm building.
- Master Donor Report
- This pulls in data from constituent table, gift table, constituent custom fields, gift custom fields, and a few others. Modeling on gift is done through soft credit (so not exactly financially good, but it's fundraising good, if you know what I mean).
- This Power BI dashboard power a donor report that allows various filtering that uses our org's business logic, have heat map, and donor category
- This Power BI dataset (semantic model) powers 12 other reports that utilize the data in the same data modeling: Donor Retention Analysis; Giving Society (membership), Monthly Giver, etc etc
- Gift Analysis
- this is like a gift report, where data is model with direct credit and specific additional data pulled in for pledge's detail (installment, payment write off).
- This report itself is like a filterable report for various business logic we build into how we record our gifts
- This report's dataset (semantic model) is used by 5 other reports that is more focus on REAL financial numbers: ScoreBoard (goal vs actual contribution), Contribution Source Analysis; Quick Fundraising Matrics, etc)
- Pledge Report
- this Power BI supports 2 dashboards
- Pledge report that shows all pledge's commitment, payment to date with column to payment for each year, and write off for each year, balance remaining, and how much is coming in based on installment for next few years
- Pledge Aging report that tells the story of overdue pledges.
- this Power BI supports 2 dashboards
Above are 3 examples of my reports build out. When I need to create a new report for a new business need, my first question is going to be, which of my dataset (semantic model) has all the data I need to build my report, if one exists, I use by connecting my new power bi to the power bi service and attach the semantic model. While I build the new report, I MAY come across additional needs (new measures to display visualization, or new calculated column to filter on, etc). Most of the time, I will just add these new needs directly into the original power bi semantic model.
My reasoning is, I "CAN" put everything into ONE dataset and all reports run through that one dataset. However, that will create a MASSIVE dataset and sometime can be conflicting (direct credit vs soft credit). Duplicated data will make it hard to work within the model too.
The biggest benefits here using Azure SQL data warehouse over Blackbaud custom connector is going to be filtering option and loading time. For example, you cannot filter to get only pledges that has a balance. Azure SQL can easily just give me that using SQL querying. Blackbaud custom connector will need to get all Pledges, then filter down on the balance property. Given the "5000 limit" per call to get data from Blackbaud server, it is a big limitation and performance issue.
