The Buzz: February 2024 Edition

Hi Community,

We are starting 2024 off strong!

Thank you to the 66 community members who left their favorite product/tip or trick to earn January’s badge and there are a lot of useful tips to read through!

If you want a complete list of each discussion by product, you can always refer to the member challenges page. It’s a great page to bookmark to keep track of the monthly challenges we have here in the community!

We will get to February’s very special first of its kind challenge in just a moment, but first there is some important news we want to make sure you see.

Payment Services Information:

If you are a Blackbaud Merchant Services™ customer, read this important information from Blackbaud about making sure your account information is up to date to maintain uninterrupted payment processing: Are You Compliant with Your Payment Services Account Information?

Celebrating Black History Month:

We are highlighting three customer organizations for Black History Month: National Museum of African American Music, JazzArts Charlotte, and The Hip Hop Museum. What are visitors surprised to learn at these museums? Find out!

Celebrating Black History Month: African Americans and the Arts

Blackbaud Community Update:

To ensure a more streamlined community experience for you, we’ve renamed the “Announcements” tab to “Blogs” across several product communities and in the coming weeks, we’ll be moving relevant content from “Tips and Tricks” over to “Blogs” to create a comprehensive one-stop repository for blog content. We will also transfer subscriptions and you can always set your subscriptions here. We announced the change in this discussion forum and recommend subscribing to it to stay on top of the improvements happening in the Blackbaud Community.

Community News Kudos:

We want to recognize members who are doing outstanding things in our community.

Austen Brown became the FIRST community member to reach one million points and now has a shiny new badge to show off created just for her, but anyone can earn it. Here is the new one million points badge:

Close to earning this new badge is Christine Robertson, who was our TOPS points earner in January with almost 300k in points!

Alex Wong replied to 102 replies in January – WTG, Alex!

Our community cheerleader, Elizabeth Johnson, gave out 106 likes in January. We LIKE that!

February Monthly Challenge:

It’s now time to announce the monthly challenge for February. This one is a first of its kind! We tapped into the brilliant minds of the new Community All-Star cohort to create several polls that will be on the community polls page and there are also more polls sprinkled throughout the community. If you answer at least one poll, you’ll receive February’s exclusive badge and the Pollster 1 badge:

A huge thanks to our new All-Stars for submitting this month’s polls for you to answer.

Generative AI Poll:

Artificial intelligence is on the top of everyone’s mind and we want to know if you plan on incorporating generative AI into your fundraising in 2024. Log on to LinkedIn and vote in Blackbaud’s poll to let us if your organization is embracing AI! You can also vote in our community poll on how often you use programs like Chat GPT here.

2024 Community All-Stars:

If you missed the announcement about the new 2024 All-Star cohort, you can read all about it here! We have 32 new All-Stars. They will be contributing content throughout 2024 and we are excited to share their expertise with the community.

If you’d like to be considered for next year’s cohort, make sure you are active and engaged in the community. You can read more about the All-Stars expectations, commitment, and perks here.

Want to read more about one of our new All-star members? Great! We’ve got a new community member in the spotlight, Nicole Holt with Preble Street.

Nicole has great insight into the Microsoft Power Platform and shares how automations are helping her organization. She also picked up a new hobby this year that has her feeling a little unsteady on her feet but is sure to inspire you!

Nicole credits the Microsoft Power User Groups mentioned below as a useful resource.

Events:

Check it out along with these other upcoming events to help you maximize your impact:

User Group: Microsoft Power BI Users (Wednesday, February 14th at noon est)

User Group: Microsoft Power Automate Users (Tuesday, February 20th at noon est)

User Group: Blackbaud Users Field of Dreams (Thursday, February 15th at 1pm est)

Town Hall: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®: Online Event Registration for Canadian Customers (Wednesday, February 21st at 11am est)

Grantmaking webinar: Change Up Your Questions: Exploring and Shaping What You Ask Grantees and How You Ask Them (Thursday, February 22nd at 11am est)

Community Tip of the Month:

The Blackbaud Community ideas bank is a great resource for members to share and vote on ideas to improve the community experience. One of the ideas that came in recently was about how replies are viewed in discussion forums. Did you know you can change how you see replies? When you are in a discussion, simply click the sort button at the top of the replies. You can sort by newest reply or oldest, depending on your preference.

Just an fyi: the community is defaulted to show replies newest to oldest. Which way do you prefer seeing the comments? That’s one of the polls you can take on the polls page!

Birthdays:

It’s the season for Aquarius and Pisces! If you are celebrating a birthday in February let us know in the comments below, so we can wish you a very happy birthday. Do we have any leap year babies?