What's in the Lunch & Learn? Five Reasons Your Organization Should Be Learning Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® by Role

To illustrate my reasoning, let’s imagine a Lunch & Learn. A development director, finance manager, communications manager, and donor database manager (you) all walk into the conference room at the same time. You listen to the chatter as your colleagues file in. Notice the priorities of each player in the scene:

• Selena (Development Director): “We have a commitment from Robert Hernandez for $5,000 in support of the Annual Fund this year. I need to send him a letter and see the pledge reflected in my reports by tomorrow morning.” Selena is the development director.
• Alice (Finance Manager): “Are we booking the pledge? Do we have at least a signed pledge form or email confirmation? I want to keep the pledge reporting accurate and well-documented. Do you do remember what happened with the auditors last year?” Alice is the finance manager.
• Mark (Communications manager): “We’re creating a short social media promo for the golf tournament, and we need a list of all the donors who attended last year for a quick email blast.” Mark is the communications manager.

If your usual first response is to down a headache powder, chase it with a can of kombucha and declare, “I got this,” this time, stop yourself. Resist the temptation to take on all the responsibility. As the donor database manager, you may long have been on autopilot, juggling all things Raiser’s Edge NXT for everyone. A new day is dawning, my friend! Raiser’s Edge NXT is being crafted to help empower every role at your organization to use the software efficiently. Every team member can make informed decisions that impact your fundraising efforts.

In my role as a functional expert, I have spoken with hundreds of Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT customers and taken a peek at more than a few databases. It’s pretty common for database managers to feel like they need to meet everyone’s needs and be the ONLY staff member in the software. If this is the case, it’s time for your organization to continue learning Raiser’s Edge NXT by individual role.

Here are my Top 5 Reasons it shouldn’t all be on you anymore:

1. Fundraisers can manage prospects and opportunities inside of Raiser’s Edge NXT. The Work Center is only the beginning! Lists, reporting dashboards, and custom dashboards give development staff access to the data already in your database. Actions can be added to constituent and opportunity records using your email inbox or workflows. Actions can be saved to your calendar or copied in web view as well.
   • Does she need a list of gifts received this fiscal year for the donors in her portfolio? That list is available in the Work Center. Imports and some table cleanup may be needed first to get the development team up and running, but that’s where you, the donor database manager, comes in. You are the data sorcerer who will take all Selena’s spreadsheets and correctly import portfolio assignments, prospect classifications and statuses into Raiser’s Edge NXT.
   • Does Selena need a quick list of constituents with recent gifts? That’s a list on the benchmarking dashboard.
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2. Finance managers can store files or links as attachments. Almost every record type in the web view has an attachments tile. That means constituents, gifts, events, actions, opportunities campaign, fund, and appeal records. There is no need to search for pledge forms, the email from Robert confirming his pledge, his donor-advised fund forms or even the check copy once he pays the pledge. Use tags and naming conventions that make documentation easy to find. To protect you from downloading malicious content, Raiser's Edge NXT now automatically scans files for viruses when you add attachments to records.
   • Pro tip for Alice: Financial Edge NXT has this same functionality, so she can store deposit or gift batch documentation directly on the corresponding general ledger batch or transaction.
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3. Communications managers can use solicit codes and create lists for email marketing that just make sense. Help Mark create constituent lists using the Total Giving filter. Help him save time by creating a list of donors with certain solicit codes or constituent codes and using the include/exclude button on constituent lists. Once Mark has his list, he can send one e-blast or a few emails using the marketing email or workflow feature in the web view. He can even add buttons to the eblasts that lead directly to your event registration forms or new optimized donation forms in Online Giving. Best of all the email statistics and any transactions from the donation forms flow right back into Raiser’s Edge NXT, giving Mark more insight into engagement and which email formats and messaging is resonating with your donors.
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4. Everybody on your team can create and benefit from automation. The annual Blackbaud developer’s conference, bbdevdays, was a smashing success! It showcased the latest no-code, low-code, and pro-code solutions to supercharge your software and fine tune your workflows to meet your organization's hyper-specific needs. You could be a newbie technology enthusiast looking for plug-and-play applications from the Blackbaud Marketplace to send text message reminders for an upcoming event or an advanced developer looking to build customized Microsoft Power BI dashboards for your team. Either way the growing Blackbaud Marketplace, developer community, developer tools, and partner community are here to help your organization get it all done.
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5. Your expertise with database view will be gold for newbies. Even if the goal is empowering team members to dive in on their own, your skills with database view will be a huge asset to them. Blackbaud continues to build out operational workflows in web view while simultaneously enhancing existing functionality. As the donor database manager, you know how Tour Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT works and you know all your teams’ current processes. Who better to help your team make informed donor, data, and technology decisions than you? You are responsible for data integrity and cleanup using tried-and-true powerful tools like Import, Table Cleanup Utility, Global Add/Change/Delete, Data Enrichment, Query and Export. You are the wizard who will reduce the number of attributes, constituent codes, and phone types that don’t make sense anymore.

I encourage organizations to use an integrated approach to database decisions. It’s the best approach for continuous process improvement. Regularly evaluating KPIs, statistics, and reporting helps the data team or the Donor Database Manager plan how and where to store data points. Does this metric or data point measure what we think it does? Do we need that paper report anymore? Most of the time, there is already a field, table, or report, for a value in Raiser’s Edge NXT. With Blackbaud’s intuitive tools and your guidance as database manager, everyone on your team can now Lunch & Learn the topics most relevant to their role.