Ask the All-Stars: How to Get the Most out of the Blackbaud Community!

We asked our Blackbaud Community All-Stars to give their best advice and tips for using the Blackbaud Community. They delivered! 

Here are their tips:  

• Take advantage of free time: Carlene Johnson recommends using down time to visit the community saying, “when I’m stuck on a Zoom meeting or have a query or export that is taking a long time to run, I pop into community and send connection requests to new members.” 

• Set up reminders: Carrie Powell sets a daily calendar reminder to log in and takes it a step further by “checking the most recent discussions for the products we use and other discussions I’ve bookmarked. If I have a tip or an answer, I reply right then. Other times, I just skim through and learn from what other experts have already shared.” 

• Subscribe to interesting forums: Alex Wong suggests subscribing to forums that interest you, even if you don’t actively participate, as they can help you expand your knowledge. Specifically, he suggests the SKY Developer forum because, “while not everyone will want to be a no/low-code developer, being able to see what’s possible can drive a creative mind.” 

• Check your subscriptions:  Christine Robertson recommends that all users check their subscriptions to “help stay up to date on all of the products they use.” Karen Diener subscribes to daily updates for all the products she uses and says, “I review posts as part of my morning routine. It’s an easy and interesting way to start my day!”  

• Make use of bookmark tools:  Brian Gray uses the bookmark tool within Community so he can reference particularly helpful discussions in the future. “I save the URL to posts that I may want to find later into a folder in my browser’s bookmark bar. I can edit the name of the browser bookmark if I need to add more information to help me find it later.” You can also bookmark helpful content to your community profile by clicking bookmark on blogs and by clicking the three dots on a discussion and choosing bookmark.  

• Connect with others in your region: Rachel Cavalier likes to connect with other users in the United Kingdom to “share UK specific challenges and solutions to database management.” She does this by reviewing member profiles and looking at their organization name and location. You update your profile with your organization name and location (city, state, and/or country) by editing your “about me” section on your profile page.

• Participate in monthly challenges: Dan Snyder recommends participating in the monthly challenges, saying “it is a good way to either build your profile or just stay active and see all that there is to the community.” Monthly challenges are opportunities to participate in a community activity to earn a unique badge. You can stay informed of all the challenges here. 

Want to learn even more about how to get the most out of Blackbaud Community? Check out our help page which has a variety of helpful articles. If you have an idea that you’d like to see implemented in the Community, let us know here.

Thank you to our All-Stars and thank YOU for being a valuable member of our community. You can read more about the Blackbaud Community All-Star program here – we encourage you to work toward becoming one!