Education is Learning What You Didn't Even Know You Didn't Know

Starting in April of 2014, the Altru Team added a new position – Altru Education Lead – created to focus specifically on the education of our customers about all things Altru. We recognized that we needed more available to our users to help when implementing Altru, training new employees and simply looking to learn new skills. Our goal is to provide educational resources, both self-service and interactive, that help create confident, capable, and engaged users in order to better fulfill their organization’s mission.

But let’s talk a bit more specifically! My name is Meredith Galdeen and I’m the new Education Lead.



Some of you might know me (or at least have heard my name) as I moved from our Professional Services team where I was an Altru Client Manager working with our newly implemented customers. I've been with Blackbaud for 7 years – 4.5 years working with Altru customers, specifically. I've been with Altru in some way since the beginning.

Coming from an education background, I've always advocated for more and better training for our customers. But I also believe personally in the power of education. I love to share my story about being a Raiser’s Edge customer and thinking that I was pretty good with the program – with no formal training. But then I started working for Blackbaud and actually had training. I was shocked at everything I had been doing in the most inefficient ways possible and all of the things that The Raiser’s Edge could do that I didn't even know about! It really turned me into someone who strongly believes that it’s time and money well spent when we invest in training.

I want to share a few of the initiatives that we're working on right now. The first is expanding our collection of free on-demand videos. We love this offering because it provides a quick, targeted training. The videos are easy to consume over and over again as you need them. But we’re not just working on more videos – we’re also working on making it easier for you to find what you need. Check out two examples of this by going to our Altru Video Library where we organize the videos by functional area and going to Training Central and searching on “Altru Curriculum”. We've only got one curriculum there currently, for Daily and Advance Sales, but we’re working on adding more.

Speaking of curricula, they don’t just contain videos, but also contain our free online instructor-led trainings and free downloadable job aids. We’re creating the curricula to help each user navigate the training that is right for them based on their job role and the tasks that they will be responsible for in Altru.

We've also expanded our free Altru Masters Workshop series (formerly known as the Mini-Series). The Masters Workshops are online instructor-led sessions that we deliver every month on a variety of topics. In some cases, the topics we’ve chosen help us fill a gap and cover an area in Altru that we don’t have a regular recurring training for now. These sessions are usually good for new customers, new employees or beginners in those areas. Other times, the themes are more advanced and targeted to our experienced Altru users to help them get more from the system. Keep an eye of the Altru Community and the Altru Blog for more on each month’s sessions.

If you're new to Altru, looking to gain skills in a new area, or just want a bigger picture than a video can provide, we’ve got a great set of free recurring online instructor-led trainings as well. These classes are offered either every other week or every third week depending on topic area. You can sign up for any of these classes by visiting Training Central.  For implementing customers, these classes are critical to having efficient and meaningful consulting sessions (in fact, we consider them required preparation for consulting). However, if you've been using Altru for a while, but never taken these trainings, I’d encourage you to sign up – you never know what you don’t know!

The last initiative I want to tell you about are new custom training packages. These training packages are delivered by one of our Altru Experts to just your organization’s Altru users, so everything discussed in the training is relevant to you. The trainings target different functional areas in Altru and are organized by user roles and tasks. They range from 4 to 8 hours, some covering beginner topics and others advanced. They can be purchased separately or combined with other packages depending on your organization’s needs. If you’d like to see the specific agendas or think this might be the right kind of training for your organization, please contact your Blackbaud Account Executive.

That’s just some of what we’re working on and I'll be writing more over the next few months to keep you up to date. I'd love to hear your feedback about what we’re doing too. Please visit the Training Page in the Altru Community to let me know how where doing, ask questions, make suggestions and find out more about what we’ve been working on!