Welcome to NXT! Our little town is growing.
Published
From the Products team, I wanted to extend a thank you to all our EAP customers who helped us during some pretty critical periods of development and a welcome to all of our new members joining NXT. We were able to work through many items that helped us prepare for our next phase of the program. We’re now onboarding new customers every week. This is an exciting time! If you are a long-time Raiser’s Edge customer, you may be unfamiliar with the new world of NXT and how we hope to grow the product and Community. But first, a quick introduction to the Top 3 of this new world:
1.Weekly Releases – Delivering ongoing goodness
You can click the
in the Help to return to this topic and review the newest features. To catch up on previous releases and features that you may’ve missed, click What’s Recent at the bottom of the “What’s New” topic. We will also post about what’s new in the Community’s Blog and mention features of future releases so you have an idea what’s coming.Call to action: Log into NXT and read the “What’s New” topic each week, subscribe to the blog, and participate in the Community!
2.Community Engagement – Get in, introduce yourself, and follow what you care about!
Raiser’s Edge has long had a great network of individuals who created a great ecosystem of knowledge and practice. We want to take that to the next level. We can — and will! —discuss the product and what we want to improve, but as soon as we mesh that with real-life use cases with effective strategies to engage donors, the Community can start to power much more than a product roadmap; we can shape how nonprofits engage each other and donors. The tie that binds is what you do and what you use to do it. We hope to join those two gracefully.
To start, learn how to join the conversation. To access the Community, simply click Community at the bottom of the Help widget.
Call to action: Welcome new members, introduce yourself, complete your profile, and follow topics you care about
3.Roadmap – What everyone wants to know.
We have exciting plans to ramp up new roles and functionality and continually develop our core architecture to support the thousands of customers who are a part of our traditional Raiser’s Edge community and all of our new customers joining from different systems. Our initial focus is on those at your organization who were underserved by Raiser’s Edge in the past, so you can continue to use the goodness of the database view while also experiencing advances for key pieces that can significantly impact your fundraising results.
Fundraisers and Fundraiser Support: As many of you are witnessing, our focus for the first phase is on relationship-based fundraising. Features like Work Center provide centralized and focused areas for fundraisers/volunteers/board members/executives to manage their portfolios and activities, with built-in intelligence to help you maintain focus on your most important donors and situations. Over the next few months, you’ll see additional functionality to round out that role and supporting roles like prospect researchers, volunteer fundraisers, and managers of fundraisers.
Executive Roles: Following the fundraiser roles, we’re putting heavy focus on web-based reporting, performance measurement, and executive role enablement for unprecedented insight and access into how your nonprofit is performing. We have much more to share on this front, but I invite you to be a part of our development process. We know we have much to accomplish and this is an area of passion. We are dedicated to getting this right for you.
Call to action: Sign up for discovery! Participate in our ideas area with detailed examples and why a feature is important to you: RE NXT Ideas
Multi-Hat Fundraisers: As we progress, we’ll enable more add and edit functionality throughout the application so someone who wears multiple hats — those who we affectionately call the “Multi-Hat Fundraiser” — can do more of their job in the NXT web view, such as to edit contact info, add records, add attributes, edit ratings, etc.
General Roadmap: After that, our goal is to enable more job functions that drive fundraising results, including events, annual fund management, marketing and communications, and more with supporting DBA management as we go. We also have exciting work ahead for our API and integrations as well as making the process for customers to get to NXT even easier. As always, we’ll continue to invest in analytics that can unlock the potential of the data in your system.
We’ll share much more of what’s coming as we progress together, but I wanted to just frame the early focus. Because we’re a part of this together, we can be nimble and respond to trends and pivot as needed. As we take this journey together, we want to focus on the best opportunities and solve the most important problems. This is your house; we’re just helping build it.
Call to action: If you consume or produce reports and insights or are a Fundraiser, Please sign up for discovery here (Discovery link) and participate in our testing. You can help us shape our final solution before it’s built.
In closing, thank you. This is the most amazing market to work in. From my 10 years of experience working directly with nonprofits, I continue to get the same feeling from all the users and staff members I’ve spoken with. Blackbaud has a direct (yet welcomed!) responsibility to help you drive your mission forward. We take that feeling seriously and will do everything we can to make you successful.
Call to action: Welcome new members, introduce yourself, complete your profile, and follow topics you care about
3.Roadmap – What everyone wants to know.
We have exciting plans to ramp up new roles and functionality and continually develop our core architecture to support the thousands of customers who are a part of our traditional Raiser’s Edge community and all of our new customers joining from different systems. Our initial focus is on those at your organization who were underserved by Raiser’s Edge in the past, so you can continue to use the goodness of the database view while also experiencing advances for key pieces that can significantly impact your fundraising results.
Fundraisers and Fundraiser Support: As many of you are witnessing, our focus for the first phase is on relationship-based fundraising. Features like Work Center provide centralized and focused areas for fundraisers/volunteers/board members/executives to manage their portfolios and activities, with built-in intelligence to help you maintain focus on your most important donors and situations. Over the next few months, you’ll see additional functionality to round out that role and supporting roles like prospect researchers, volunteer fundraisers, and managers of fundraisers.
Executive Roles: Following the fundraiser roles, we’re putting heavy focus on web-based reporting, performance measurement, and executive role enablement for unprecedented insight and access into how your nonprofit is performing. We have much more to share on this front, but I invite you to be a part of our development process. We know we have much to accomplish and this is an area of passion. We are dedicated to getting this right for you.
Call to action: Sign up for discovery! Participate in our ideas area with detailed examples and why a feature is important to you: RE NXT Ideas
Multi-Hat Fundraisers: As we progress, we’ll enable more add and edit functionality throughout the application so someone who wears multiple hats — those who we affectionately call the “Multi-Hat Fundraiser” — can do more of their job in the NXT web view, such as to edit contact info, add records, add attributes, edit ratings, etc.
General Roadmap: After that, our goal is to enable more job functions that drive fundraising results, including events, annual fund management, marketing and communications, and more with supporting DBA management as we go. We also have exciting work ahead for our API and integrations as well as making the process for customers to get to NXT even easier. As always, we’ll continue to invest in analytics that can unlock the potential of the data in your system.
We’ll share much more of what’s coming as we progress together, but I wanted to just frame the early focus. Because we’re a part of this together, we can be nimble and respond to trends and pivot as needed. As we take this journey together, we want to focus on the best opportunities and solve the most important problems. This is your house; we’re just helping build it.
Call to action: If you consume or produce reports and insights or are a Fundraiser, Please sign up for discovery here (Discovery link) and participate in our testing. You can help us shape our final solution before it’s built.
In closing, thank you. This is the most amazing market to work in. From my 10 years of experience working directly with nonprofits, I continue to get the same feeling from all the users and staff members I’ve spoken with. Blackbaud has a direct (yet welcomed!) responsibility to help you drive your mission forward. We take that feeling seriously and will do everything we can to make you successful.
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Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT® Blog
06/11/2015 8:02am EDT
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