Fasten Your Seatbelts, Updates To Raiser's Edge NXT Coming Fast

When your organization signed up for Raiser's Edge NXT, our commitment to you was we would rapidly work to develop more and more features in the web view so that you would gradually do more of your work here. You're going to see a lot of evidence of this promise fulfilled this year, with sweeping changes to data health, gift management, email communications, event management and workflow automation. 

More Frequent Product Updates
We used to release new features and product fixes once or twice a year. Now, our agile software development enables us to push frequent updates, giving you the benefit of access to new features as soon as they're available. With this year's push to create "next generation" features in web view, we will release a large number of new features as an MVP, or "minimum valuable product", and then rapidly add features, functionality, and interactivity until the capabilities far exceed any you have now. (It also means you'll see more frequent "what's new" announcements.) For a good explanation of this, check Steve Stegelin's blog post from last week: MVPs For MVPs: Minimal Valuable Products, To Learn From Our Most Valuable Players.

Don't be discouraged if you see that a new feature is available for "some of you". In an abundance of caution, we release new features to very small groups of accounts initially. We roll out updates in "waves" as small as 50 accounts. If the first wave goes well, we release to ever greater numbers of accounts. While we've proven our code through extensive testing before we do a release, we want the ability to halt and adjust any issues we encounter, while impacting the minimum number of accounts. For more about this release strategy, check out the blog post Early Birds of a Feather: From CTPs to Waved Rollouts from last year. 

    
What to do with So. Many. Updates?
In the meantime, you get a blizzard of product updates each week. So many new things, and you've still got your day job to do. How do you keep up, and when's the right time to start using the new tools?  

When you adopt a new feature or tool may depend on your role or needs. We'll let you know every week what's new in Raiser's Edge NXT. Every little feature. We'll also commit to tell you when these smaller updates add up to something larger, an entirely new workflow that could enable you to shift a business processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, in the future you'll be able to automate recurring gifts processing. If you're ready to take manual monthly processing responsibilities off your plate, we'll make sure there's plenty of how-to help to guide you in updating sustainer processes.

Your Best Options for Tracking Raiser's Edge NXT Updates
Here are some of the best ways to learn more about what's coming:

For all of the details, as they happen: 

• Community Announcements - Want to get every update almost as-it-happens? Subscribe to Raiser's Edge Community Announcements by clicking on the "Subscribe" link at the top of the page (in this blog). Select "Instant". You'll get updates - at a minimum of once a week - about all of the new features and functions. 
   
• What's New, Recent and Next - The best way to get all of the details of current, future, and previous releases is the What's New Help and What's Recent Help and What's Next Help. To help keep you up-to-date on the most recent developments, on a near-weekly basis, the What's New Help automatically opens when you log in to the web view. To get the full picture, check out the What's Recent Help and What's Next Help to catch up on previous releases or see what's on the horizon.
   
• In-Product Help - Throughout Raiser's Edge NXT, Help documentation is context sensitive. Anywhere in the product, if you click the bright green (?) at the top right of your screen, you'll get help for that feature.  
    

For a bigger picture: 

• Roadmap Update Webinars - If you can attend only one Blackbaud webinar, sign up for a roadmap webinar. We promise a comprehensive, condensed look at recent releases and "coming soon" features. In these hour-long presentations, experts from our product development team recap features we've been working on over the past few months and share details about updates coming your way.
    
• Blackbaud University - Our training team begins to incorporate mature new features into the Blackbaud University curriculum for Raiser's Edge NXT once they're generally available to all customers. We'll announce new courses here in the Community. Blackbaud University courses help you gain an end-to-end understanding of how features function and how to apply them in your day-to-day work. 
     
• Blackbaud Webinars - We offer frequent webinars that explore new features in depth. Check the Events tab in the Raiser's Edge NXT Community for upcoming webinars. You can also use the webinar search on Blackbaud.com to find gems like the "My Favorite Feature" series in which product managers explore new features in depth.  

You can also post a discussion thread in this Community to engage with your peers and Blackbaud's product teams, marketing, and customer success about what's new. Feel free to also ask a Blackbaud team member who's a regular contributor a direct question through Community. 

We look forward to sharing a lot of increasingly useful and exciting features with you as they come out over the course of this year and next!