What's New In Raiser's Edge NXT The Week of November 26

This week, many of the features that were previously only available to some are now generally available in Raiser's Edge NXT! Other features continue their waved roll outs. Log in to see all that's new for your organization.  Enter gifts in batch (now generally available).

From Fundraising, Gift management, you can now add multiple gift records together as a group. For example, you can enter a batch of the week's one-time gifts paid by check.

With gift batches, you can:

• Manage gifts as a group with a shared batch ID.

• Use the batch approval process for data quality control.

• Save batches while in progress and return later to add more gifts.

Gifts from other sources, such as automatic recurring gifts, are automatically placed into unapproved batches based on source, date, payment method, and payment configuration. You're able to review the gifts before you approve the batch and create gift records.

For more information, see Gift Management.

Add and automate recurring gifts (now generally available). 

From Fundraising, Gift management, you can now add automatic recurring gifts in the web view to automatically generate payments based on a schedule, such as when a constituent signs up to donate the same amount each month. Recurring gift payments are placed in unapproved batches and you must approve them to create their gift records. For more information, see Recurring Gifts.

If your organization has existing recurring gifts, you can convert them to automatic recurring gifts in the web view — saving time and eliminating the need to manually process payments. For more information, see Automate Manual Recurring Gifts.

Skip upcoming automatic payments on behalf of donor. From time to time, donors may want to skip one or more upcoming payments for their recurring gifts. To honor these requests, you can now skip payments from recurring gift records and view when transactions start again.

Under Recurring gift summary, select Skip next payments and choose how to skip them. You can choose to skip payments until a specific date, or indicate how many to skip. For more information, see Skip Automatic Recurring Gift Payments.

Performance improvements for gift records (for some of you). To help you more quickly access information, and to support upcoming changes in Gift Management, we updated gift records to enhance performance. As a result, any custom display settings you saved for gift records — such as moved or collapsed sections — were removed and set back to the default. To reset them, simply arrange the information again. Records remember the changes, so you only need to reset your preferences once. For more information, see Records. 

Create and schedule online posts (now generally available). With Social Posting, you can engage with your supporters on Facebook and Twitter from a central location in Raiser's Edge NXT. From Marketing, Social, create the content of your posts, add images (up to four per post!), post immediately to your social media accounts or schedule it for later, and keep track of all previous posts. For more information, see Social Posting.

Track custom information about event participants (now generally available). To help track custom information about participants, such as t-shirt sizes, meal preferences, and seating requests, you can now add fields — known as participant options — to collect details that are specific to each event. Participant options provide flexibility because you can gather different information for the same option in various events. For example, create meal preference fields with different food choices in each dinner event you host.

For each event, under Participant options, add the fields and their values. After you set the options, add them to the online registration form and then manage responses from participant records under Participant options. For more information, see Participant Options.

Note: Participant options are like custom fields, but they’re not the same. With custom fields, you use the same field and the same options for different events. With participant options, you add new fields and values for each event. In a future release, you’ll be able to copy an event and reuse options that are the same for the new event. For more information, see Custom Fields.

 



 

Analyze campaign and fund performance. To help ease common analysis of giving, Raiser's Edge NXT provides several gift insights out-of-the-box in Report builder.

From Analysis, Report builder, Insights, you can now view the Campaign performance and Fund performance insights. With these new insights, you can assess your organization's fundraising efforts by each campaign and fund.

For each fund or campaign, you can view: 

• How many donors gave in total

• How much — and how many gifts — those donors gave

• Average amount gifted

• How the fund’s total gifts exceeded (or fell short) of its goal

For more information, see Gift Insights.

Report on education information with new attributes and insights. A constituent's education history contributes to their life story and often determines which causes they'll invest their time and money in. With this information, you can build constituent relationships, identify potential donors in alumni, create targeted appeals by class year, and more.

From Analysis, Report builder, Insights, you can now view the out-of-the-box Alumni class summary insight. With this insight, you can view how many of a graduating class were donors, both in total and as a percentage, and how much — and how many gifts — those donors gave.

With this information, you can compare giving across class years and identify how your fundraising efforts trend over time. For more information, see Gift Insights.

For those with Insight designer, you can also create your own customized metrics beyond what’s available out-of-the-box in Report builder. To help improve how you analyze insights, you can apply education attributes  to break measures down, including Class of, Degree, School name, and more.

You can also apply new Date  attributes to analyze by time period, including Date entered school, Date graduated, and Date left school.

Note: In the database view, you can add and edit education information from the constituent's record. You can also mark a school as primary. To manage this information, select Education on the Bio 1 tab.

 

Process credit card payments more securely with point-to-point encryption (for some of you). To provide increased security and reduce the amount you spend on annual PCI audits, you can now enable point-to-point encryption (P2PE) for credit card payments.

Raiser’s Edge NXT partners with Bluefin® Payment Systems to offer a PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution for organizations who process payments with Blackbaud Merchant Services. The solution encrypts cardholder data at the point of interaction in a PCI-approved ID Tech SREDKey P2PE device and decrypts data off-site in an approved hardware security module. After you enable point-to-point encryption from Settings, Gift Management, you must swipe or key in card details through a Bluefin P2PE device each time you add a credit card payment.