Preparing for 20/20 Vision

Published

I’ve been excited about 2020 since the 1990s. I remember thinking the switch to 2000 was going to be so strange—and then I wondered if we’d all have 20/20 vision in the year 2020.

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Since then, I’ve worked in the nonprofit and social good space for two decades. And I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard and said things like:

I wish I would have known that sooner
Looking back, I would have done x-y-z differently
Knowing what I know now, I would have done that differently

As you prepare for the end of 2019 and the arrival of 2020, what are some of your goals for your organization and eTapestry?

Writing better appeals?
Cleaning up your database?
Doing things more quickly?
Creating better queries (or understanding Query better)?
Or something else?

As I do my own preparing for 2020, I want to ensure that I cover all your top eTapestry topics with Blackbaud

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University courses, blogs, and discussions.

Do you have ideas? Let me know in the comments, or complete the poll at the top-right of your Blackbaud Community eTapestry Home page. Let’s help each other make 2020 the best year yet!

News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud eTapestry® Tips and Tricks 09/16/2019 12:59pm EDT

Added by Melissa Rancour

2 Comments

Eric Jacobs Sep '19

Melissa, my goals for eTapestry are all things I wish the product could do to make it easier/faster to use. The poll you refer to is how *I* could do things better, but what I really need help with is the eTapestry development team implementing things that would make eTap easier to use. I have at least a dozen things I've come across in the 15 months I've been an eTap user that would *greatly* improve life, and I tried sending them to someone at Blackbaud, but never heard back. (Simple example: being able to Command-click/Right-Click to open a record in a new tab, so you could look at two records side-by-side, or open five records from a query at once. The inability to do this drives me and my staff crazy -- and makes doing a lot of our week in eTapestry take longer and put more demands on the severs to continually re-run queries.)

I've looked at the Community forum, but the Top ideas there which aren't yet implemented have *hundreds* of votes over many years, so it makes it seem very unlikely that submitting a new idea this way will ever grow to have hundreds of votes and get the attention of the developers. Why waste time documenting ideas if they're unlikely to get attention?

So my wish for 2020: a better way to submit ideas the product managers can review and triage into ideas that are good and can be implemented quickly, ideas that are good that require longer development further in the future, and ideas which don't make the grade or got back into the black hole of future ideas.

Eric Jacobs Sep '19

The eTapestry Product Roadmap Webinar that's linked on the right side of this site led me to a webinar that I watched for a while until I determined that it was a webinar from mid-2018! It said this was a biannual product update webinar -- so are there more recent ones since we're about more than a year later than that webinar. Or has there been no such update since mid-2018? (If so, you should probably remove that Category link.)