Meet Ryan Hyde!
Meet (and friend!) Ryan Hyde, a Luminate Online, Raiser's Edge, Sphere, TeamRaiser, and Financial Edge user, with Lollypop Farm. Bonus: cute kitties, puppies, and goats inside!
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Meet Ryan Hyde!
This week's member spotlight shines on Raiser's Edge, Luminate Online, Sphere, TeamRaiser, and Financial Edge user, Ryan Hyde, with Lollypop Farm. |
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Tell us about your family (fur babies count!) "My wife and I live in a cozy house with one dog, Scout. Scout is a 9 year old Australian Shepherd mix who comes to work with me just about every day." Where do you live? "Rochester, N.Y." What do you like to do for fun? "Hobbies include: reading, bread baking, computer building, art, photography (my user photo is a self portrait), and pretending like I'm going to write a novel but never actually doing it." What’s a life achievement you are particularly proud of? "I was a college prep English teacher and academic adviser for 6 years at a cutting edge public school in southeast Michigan. While I eventually decided that I needed to reclaim my weekends from essay grading, I am extremely proud of the student lives I impacted. Many of them still reach out to me for advice, support, and references to this day." |
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Tell us about your organization "Lollypop Farm, Humane Society of Greater Rochester, is one of the largest Humane Societies in the country (though certainly not the largest), and definitely the largest Humane Society in upstate NY. We were initially founded in 1873 (yes, eighteen-hundred and seventy-three) to help abandoned mules along the Erie Canal, and later we helped create some of the first animal abuse and child abuse laws in New York. Today we help find new homes for many thousands of animals a year, as well as providing free or reduced cost spay/neuter surgeries for the community." What’s a typical day like for you? "My days are pretty diverse, honestly. I do a lot of day-to-day data cleaning within Raiser's Edge, but I'm often working on new projects in our animal database (PetPoint), putting together new reports, and answering adhoc data questions as fast as I can, on top of customer service work for recurring gifts and that sort of thing." What’s the best part of your job? "I love coming up with new reports and visualizations. The built in Raiser's Edge reports are good at what they're good at, but we all know that they're not the most visually dynamic reports ever (thought I hear NXT stuff is pretty great looking). I love pulling out large datasets and plugging away at them in Tableau, R, or Excel, whichever makes the most sense for the job. I know people know me as an Excel guy, but I actually spend a lot more of my creative energy on Tableau." |
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What advice would you give someone starting out in the non-profit field? "My experience is limited to the database side of things, so for someone who is starting off in Raiser's Edge products, you simply must do two things: 1) Get involved in the Community! There's so much to learn, and it's full of great people who are genuinely good at explaining stuff. 2) Get comfortable with chat support, and don't just use it when something breaks. I swear, I learned half of what I know just from asking chat support folks random questions. They've always been patient, knowledgeable, and prompt." What do you love about the Blackbaud Community? "I feel like as a community, we certainly try our best to help folks, even when the questions are vague or the solution they want just isn't possible. Every one of us who routinely post comments truly want to help you, solve your problem with you, and make sure you understand the solution to the problem so that you can go on to more interesting problems in the future!" |
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| If you could have a theme song, what would it be? "'Scientist' by The Dandy Warhols." | ||
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