Ami on the Run: Day 2 Keynote Live Blog
Published
Good morning community! It's Day 2 of bbcon and I'm back for the day 2 keynote speech. Let's see what Kevin McDearis and Mary Beth Westmoreland have to talk about today.
9:03: Kevin McDearis and Mary Beth Westmoreland take the stage. The energy is already high to kick off the day! Kevin and Mary Beth take a second look at the themes Mike touched on yesterday. Transformative moments, an ecosystem of good, innovation.
9:04: It's time to talk about technology. No longer do we have to mass e-mail every constituent all at once. Technology allows us to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Perhaps there's a person who just experienced a change in economic status and is motivated to donate to your cause, or someone on social media who is interested in promoting and being vocal about your cause. Technology can now identify and connect you to those people better.
9:06: "The cloud. You can't turn on your tv or radio without hearing about it." The power of the cloud isn't just about agility or scale, it's about access. Blackbaud SKY is the ONLY cloud built for the social good community. When you're responsible for managing your own hardware and servers, it takes time and is expensive. Agile cloud-based experiences from Blackbaud ensures that your organization can stay more focused on your mission, instead of on the hardware that makes it possible.
9:08: A look back: 1981-2014 - 8 product updates a year. In the last 15 months - 2,500 new updates. "It's kind of like the farm to table restaurants." It's fresh, it's new, and we're able to get them straight out to you immediately. It allows us to respond to your needs and get updates to you faster.
9:09: "You told us that you want a delightful, cool, seamless, effortless interface." "So we built you SKY UX." It's built to be simple and intuitive to use, and gives you access to your data anytime, anywhere on any device.
9:10: In just over 15 months we've gone from 0 to over 12,000 organization benefiting from SKY UX. Raisers Edge, on Products, Financial Edge, Blackbaud Outcomes, just to name a few.
9:11: We're now looking at some screenshots of SKY UX in action. It's sleek, intuitive, and appears very easy to use.
9:13: "Let's talk about what's coming next". Major enhancements (2.0 release) has SKY rolling out to more products, plus integrated into GIFTSOnline, Angelpoints, Blackbaud CRM. Major announcement: The first Sky Mobile App will be rolling out for Blackbaud CRM so you can access your data on the go!
9:14: SKY UX is open source! It's available for your use today via Github
9:15: Next up, SKY API. "Think of it as a gateway that sits between two pieces of software." and will allow seamless integration between the products you use.
9:16: "If you're technical, I suggest you check out our repository on github." We wanted it to be very open and accessible. "We want everybody to party with our Blackbaud API's."
9:17: "We ran an EAP with API's." A video rolls featuring BizNet, one organization that took advantage of this program. API's made it simple to bring info between Raiser's Edge and Excel without copy and pasting, just the press of a button. "Working with Blackbaud and SKY API has been a pretty amazing experience. If anything is missing, they are able to add it pretty quickly." A lot of out of the box authentication and connection methods that make it simple to implement.
9:19: The video ends. Kevin: "We have learned so much from our partners using API as much as they've learned from us." As more of you add to the openness of the SKY platform, together we build the technology available for the social good movement.
9:20: Announcement: General availablilty for SKY API to all customers later this quarter.
9:21: We'll be adding more and more integration, and are starting with Salesforce. Dana Troy (St. Anthony Foundation) described it as a "Game Changer." "But we're not stopping there." Coming soon: RENEXT integration with Microsoft Dynamics, Office, OneNote and more.
9:22: We've extended new capabilities across our whole cloud solution line. Examples: Embedded Analytics, SKY Reporting. Sky Reports give you key insights into your data and present them to you just at the right moment. They help to identify important segments: potential giving opportunities, board members, etc. This functionality currently exists in Luminate Online and RENEXT and will be rolled out to other products soon.
9:24: A video rolls featuring Notre Dame de Namur University. Many of the students are the first in their family to attend college. The main building or "heart" of the campus is Ralstan Hall, but had to be closed for safety purposes. Solution: A fundraiser for Ralstan Hall. Enter The Taube Challenge. A major donor, Tad Taube offered to donate $6 million for the building's restoration IF and only IF other donors were able to match the donation, for a total of $12 million. They chose Raisers Edge NXT to run the program. At the end of the year they had exceeded their $6 million goal by $400,000. This event put them on the map in the Bay Area, and now they are able to serve more students, better.
9:28: What's ahead for Sky Reporting: Executive Dashboards - available in select products now, rolling out to more soon. Drag and Drop Reporting (Coming EOY 2016) and Advanced Custom Reporting (Coming 2017)
9:29: Announcement: In Altru available today: Member Only Events. This new feature gives you the ability to provide registration and events to your members only. By Spring 2017 we'll be rolling out the ability to issue Guest Passes. Make sure you check out all of the roadmap sessions to hear more product announcements.
9:32: Even more Sky goodness coming in the future! On to the next: Modern Engineering and Architecture for better quality and reliability and building a culture of consisten improvement. We aim for: Frictionless experience, tightly integrated solutions, higher performance.
9:33: Frictionless: No data conversion, easy and intuitive, and roadmap transparency. Smaller more incremental releases that happen on their own without new downloads, updates, or downtime. More investment in self help like developer tools and customer communities. New features in products (currently using FE as an example) with simple clean interfaces to make tasks like credit card updating, matching transactions and more, easier and faster to accomplish.
9:38: Announcement: This year we will have new simple checkout capability for Blackbaud Payments, and integration with services like Visa Checkout and Master Pass. Also makes it easy to keep info up to date to avoid lots of manual effort.
9:39: On to the topic of integrated solutions. "Our cloud model is really unique, because it's from one single accountable partner...and that's Blackbaud."
9:40: "Good data is the foundation for our Sky solutions." Fully integrated and vertically-optimized to reflect best practices for amazingly intuitive solutions and streamlined daily tasks.
9:42: To "complete the picture of the constituent" is one of the hardest tasks for a non-profit. Over the last year we've been working on something called Persistent Key. Better de-duping because Blackbaud can now do it for you, smart enough to know that Robert Hernandez, Bob Herdandez and R. Hernandez are the same person, even if the data is different. You will recieve updates on constituents in real time as the data comes in.
9:43: Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: We have 3 different offerings for you: Team Raiser for large grroup events like big walks for example. Everydayhero, a self-serive crowd funding product that allows people to fundraise for their own cause. And now, ANNOUCNEMENT a new option: Everydayhero PRO for smaller and midsize events and virtual events. Integrates seamlessly with RENXT and FENXT today.
9:46: "But wait there's more!' Free 3 month trial to Everydayhero PRO for all bbcon attendees. Visit the Everydayhero booth for more info.
9:47: Switching gears, a video now plays to show the benefits of RENXT Luminate Online integration featuring the Van Andel Institute. "I use RENXT before I meet with any donor." "I love the reminders on my page to remind me to who reach out to and what actions we're taking with our donor." "The advantage that Blackbaud brings is that you have all of these solutions and get a 360 view of your consitituents.
9:50: What's ahead? "We're going big with big data." New SKY services across entire portfolio in 2017. Plus, Blackaud Outcomes next year for Expanded Analytics. Adopting Sustainable Development Goals.
9:52: Finally, let's talk about higher performance. 24/7 monitoring, defect rates shifted from high to industry leading, majority of issues discovered before reported, 99.9% availability. Let's listen to a customer who had some anxiety about moving to the cloud and how it's going for them.
9:54: A video rolls. MUSC is a healthcare org that uses fundraising to push new initiatives forward like new buildings, improvements, etc. Without having to do backups, sandboxing and other things require for hosted solutions--the cloud does everything automatically and frees up so much time and available resources. Fundraisers on the go have what they need at their fingertips and don't have to engage in back and forth with the home office.
9:56: Another video rolls immediately, Steve Guggenhiemer from Microsoft. "The movement to the cloud is at the heart of a lot of dialogues." Symmetry between on-premises and cloud. You get to decide what is behind the firewall and what's on the cloud. Azure makes it possible to run more products at scale in more places. Blackbaud and Microsoft is a partnership well made.
9:59: Coming next: Greater scale, continued response time improvememts and ongoing transparency. We see what you guys accomplished over the years and see a huge increases in e-mails sent (over 1 billion!) and donations coming in. Rest assured that we are prepared to scale with you. Working on new status dashboard to increased transparency and ease of finding information about downtime.
10:01: Finally, the Culture of Innovation. What is this cutlrue grounded in? 1) Listening. Our discovery process has changed to bring you in eary and often and validate with you before product releases to make sure we're providing something of the most value to you. Also, the integration of Telemtry data to see how you're using the product and how we can improve the experience. 2) Disruptive Innovation. This means pushing ourselves to the leading edge and using our knowledge of the market to create outcomes that no one even imagined. We're working with Amazon with Alexa and Microsoft with Cortana to explore voice and gesture based giving and data.
10:05: Mary Beth crosses the stage to interact with an Amazon Echo device. She speaks to the device and asks for more information on Robert Hernandez. Alexa (the device) is able to provide information on the constituent, giving history, and the next action to take with them. It even tells your if your next action is overdue. Mary Beth then asks about Education Services data, and Alexa is able to dictate how many higher education organizations that Blackbaud serves. It's the future!!
10:07: Oh boy. Alexa even has Fundraising jokes. I'll have to find the video later. It's gold.
10:08: We want to redefine what "open" means, meaning we openly share our technology, data, and expertise. Our approach to innovation is also forward-looking, where we will focus on research, talent, and mergers and acquisitions. We will continue our bi-annual hackathon events to really push the envelope on innovation. We are building the largest, openly available respository of industry data available.
10:09: An example of our most recent acquisition is Attentive.ly, which will help to identify your social ambassadors through social listening features. More social features coming next year.
10:11: The Luminate product teams have been working hard over the last year on Lumiante Next Gen. The first iteration is now widely available and provides easy access to powerful metrics and a beautiful dashboard experience to find data that you used to have to dig and find. More capabilities coming soon.
10:12: A video plays featuring the National Kidney Foundation. "Being an early adopter is FUN." They love to see when Blackbaud takes their feedback into consideration and makes changes based on it. "The transparency that they provide us is a game changer." Because NKF have data all in one place, it's much easier to pull the data they need and consult with their staff on results from events locally and nationwide. "Another helpful feature is that the dashboards help measure retention" which was really hard to pull earlier and took multiple reports. Now it's right there on the dashboard. Now the NKF can make real-time data driven decisions to help sustain their growth.
10:15: "In summary, we're making good better." And there's more announcements coming. Make sure you check out the roadmap sessions to learn more about what's coming.
10:16: "Know that we are going big. REALLY big." Let's take a look at what that looks like. The philanthropy sector is BIG, but with the power of the cloud we're going to make it easier to coordinate with orgs, corporations, individuals, and more. As an example, when a devastating earthquake hits, the cloud-connected ecosystem could coordinate disaster relief efforts like medical supplies, transportation, shelters and beyond. This is the ecosystem of good that we're trying to build, to change the way we give, respond and work together both locally and globally.
10:19: "What you've seen today is just the beginning." With that, Kevin signs off and that's a wrap for the Day 2 keynote!
9:03: Kevin McDearis and Mary Beth Westmoreland take the stage. The energy is already high to kick off the day! Kevin and Mary Beth take a second look at the themes Mike touched on yesterday. Transformative moments, an ecosystem of good, innovation.
9:04: It's time to talk about technology. No longer do we have to mass e-mail every constituent all at once. Technology allows us to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Perhaps there's a person who just experienced a change in economic status and is motivated to donate to your cause, or someone on social media who is interested in promoting and being vocal about your cause. Technology can now identify and connect you to those people better.
9:06: "The cloud. You can't turn on your tv or radio without hearing about it." The power of the cloud isn't just about agility or scale, it's about access. Blackbaud SKY is the ONLY cloud built for the social good community. When you're responsible for managing your own hardware and servers, it takes time and is expensive. Agile cloud-based experiences from Blackbaud ensures that your organization can stay more focused on your mission, instead of on the hardware that makes it possible.
9:08: A look back: 1981-2014 - 8 product updates a year. In the last 15 months - 2,500 new updates. "It's kind of like the farm to table restaurants." It's fresh, it's new, and we're able to get them straight out to you immediately. It allows us to respond to your needs and get updates to you faster.
9:09: "You told us that you want a delightful, cool, seamless, effortless interface." "So we built you SKY UX." It's built to be simple and intuitive to use, and gives you access to your data anytime, anywhere on any device.
9:10: In just over 15 months we've gone from 0 to over 12,000 organization benefiting from SKY UX. Raisers Edge, on Products, Financial Edge, Blackbaud Outcomes, just to name a few.
9:11: We're now looking at some screenshots of SKY UX in action. It's sleek, intuitive, and appears very easy to use.
9:13: "Let's talk about what's coming next". Major enhancements (2.0 release) has SKY rolling out to more products, plus integrated into GIFTSOnline, Angelpoints, Blackbaud CRM. Major announcement: The first Sky Mobile App will be rolling out for Blackbaud CRM so you can access your data on the go!
9:14: SKY UX is open source! It's available for your use today via Github
9:15: Next up, SKY API. "Think of it as a gateway that sits between two pieces of software." and will allow seamless integration between the products you use.
9:16: "If you're technical, I suggest you check out our repository on github." We wanted it to be very open and accessible. "We want everybody to party with our Blackbaud API's."
9:17: "We ran an EAP with API's." A video rolls featuring BizNet, one organization that took advantage of this program. API's made it simple to bring info between Raiser's Edge and Excel without copy and pasting, just the press of a button. "Working with Blackbaud and SKY API has been a pretty amazing experience. If anything is missing, they are able to add it pretty quickly." A lot of out of the box authentication and connection methods that make it simple to implement.
9:19: The video ends. Kevin: "We have learned so much from our partners using API as much as they've learned from us." As more of you add to the openness of the SKY platform, together we build the technology available for the social good movement.
9:20: Announcement: General availablilty for SKY API to all customers later this quarter.
9:21: We'll be adding more and more integration, and are starting with Salesforce. Dana Troy (St. Anthony Foundation) described it as a "Game Changer." "But we're not stopping there." Coming soon: RENEXT integration with Microsoft Dynamics, Office, OneNote and more.
9:22: We've extended new capabilities across our whole cloud solution line. Examples: Embedded Analytics, SKY Reporting. Sky Reports give you key insights into your data and present them to you just at the right moment. They help to identify important segments: potential giving opportunities, board members, etc. This functionality currently exists in Luminate Online and RENEXT and will be rolled out to other products soon.
9:24: A video rolls featuring Notre Dame de Namur University. Many of the students are the first in their family to attend college. The main building or "heart" of the campus is Ralstan Hall, but had to be closed for safety purposes. Solution: A fundraiser for Ralstan Hall. Enter The Taube Challenge. A major donor, Tad Taube offered to donate $6 million for the building's restoration IF and only IF other donors were able to match the donation, for a total of $12 million. They chose Raisers Edge NXT to run the program. At the end of the year they had exceeded their $6 million goal by $400,000. This event put them on the map in the Bay Area, and now they are able to serve more students, better.
9:28: What's ahead for Sky Reporting: Executive Dashboards - available in select products now, rolling out to more soon. Drag and Drop Reporting (Coming EOY 2016) and Advanced Custom Reporting (Coming 2017)
9:29: Announcement: In Altru available today: Member Only Events. This new feature gives you the ability to provide registration and events to your members only. By Spring 2017 we'll be rolling out the ability to issue Guest Passes. Make sure you check out all of the roadmap sessions to hear more product announcements.
9:32: Even more Sky goodness coming in the future! On to the next: Modern Engineering and Architecture for better quality and reliability and building a culture of consisten improvement. We aim for: Frictionless experience, tightly integrated solutions, higher performance.
9:33: Frictionless: No data conversion, easy and intuitive, and roadmap transparency. Smaller more incremental releases that happen on their own without new downloads, updates, or downtime. More investment in self help like developer tools and customer communities. New features in products (currently using FE as an example) with simple clean interfaces to make tasks like credit card updating, matching transactions and more, easier and faster to accomplish.
9:38: Announcement: This year we will have new simple checkout capability for Blackbaud Payments, and integration with services like Visa Checkout and Master Pass. Also makes it easy to keep info up to date to avoid lots of manual effort.
9:39: On to the topic of integrated solutions. "Our cloud model is really unique, because it's from one single accountable partner...and that's Blackbaud."
9:40: "Good data is the foundation for our Sky solutions." Fully integrated and vertically-optimized to reflect best practices for amazingly intuitive solutions and streamlined daily tasks.
9:42: To "complete the picture of the constituent" is one of the hardest tasks for a non-profit. Over the last year we've been working on something called Persistent Key. Better de-duping because Blackbaud can now do it for you, smart enough to know that Robert Hernandez, Bob Herdandez and R. Hernandez are the same person, even if the data is different. You will recieve updates on constituents in real time as the data comes in.
9:43: Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: We have 3 different offerings for you: Team Raiser for large grroup events like big walks for example. Everydayhero, a self-serive crowd funding product that allows people to fundraise for their own cause. And now, ANNOUCNEMENT a new option: Everydayhero PRO for smaller and midsize events and virtual events. Integrates seamlessly with RENXT and FENXT today.
9:46: "But wait there's more!' Free 3 month trial to Everydayhero PRO for all bbcon attendees. Visit the Everydayhero booth for more info.
9:47: Switching gears, a video now plays to show the benefits of RENXT Luminate Online integration featuring the Van Andel Institute. "I use RENXT before I meet with any donor." "I love the reminders on my page to remind me to who reach out to and what actions we're taking with our donor." "The advantage that Blackbaud brings is that you have all of these solutions and get a 360 view of your consitituents.
9:50: What's ahead? "We're going big with big data." New SKY services across entire portfolio in 2017. Plus, Blackaud Outcomes next year for Expanded Analytics. Adopting Sustainable Development Goals.
9:52: Finally, let's talk about higher performance. 24/7 monitoring, defect rates shifted from high to industry leading, majority of issues discovered before reported, 99.9% availability. Let's listen to a customer who had some anxiety about moving to the cloud and how it's going for them.
9:54: A video rolls. MUSC is a healthcare org that uses fundraising to push new initiatives forward like new buildings, improvements, etc. Without having to do backups, sandboxing and other things require for hosted solutions--the cloud does everything automatically and frees up so much time and available resources. Fundraisers on the go have what they need at their fingertips and don't have to engage in back and forth with the home office.
9:56: Another video rolls immediately, Steve Guggenhiemer from Microsoft. "The movement to the cloud is at the heart of a lot of dialogues." Symmetry between on-premises and cloud. You get to decide what is behind the firewall and what's on the cloud. Azure makes it possible to run more products at scale in more places. Blackbaud and Microsoft is a partnership well made.
9:59: Coming next: Greater scale, continued response time improvememts and ongoing transparency. We see what you guys accomplished over the years and see a huge increases in e-mails sent (over 1 billion!) and donations coming in. Rest assured that we are prepared to scale with you. Working on new status dashboard to increased transparency and ease of finding information about downtime.
10:01: Finally, the Culture of Innovation. What is this cutlrue grounded in? 1) Listening. Our discovery process has changed to bring you in eary and often and validate with you before product releases to make sure we're providing something of the most value to you. Also, the integration of Telemtry data to see how you're using the product and how we can improve the experience. 2) Disruptive Innovation. This means pushing ourselves to the leading edge and using our knowledge of the market to create outcomes that no one even imagined. We're working with Amazon with Alexa and Microsoft with Cortana to explore voice and gesture based giving and data.
10:05: Mary Beth crosses the stage to interact with an Amazon Echo device. She speaks to the device and asks for more information on Robert Hernandez. Alexa (the device) is able to provide information on the constituent, giving history, and the next action to take with them. It even tells your if your next action is overdue. Mary Beth then asks about Education Services data, and Alexa is able to dictate how many higher education organizations that Blackbaud serves. It's the future!!
10:07: Oh boy. Alexa even has Fundraising jokes. I'll have to find the video later. It's gold.
10:08: We want to redefine what "open" means, meaning we openly share our technology, data, and expertise. Our approach to innovation is also forward-looking, where we will focus on research, talent, and mergers and acquisitions. We will continue our bi-annual hackathon events to really push the envelope on innovation. We are building the largest, openly available respository of industry data available.
10:09: An example of our most recent acquisition is Attentive.ly, which will help to identify your social ambassadors through social listening features. More social features coming next year.
10:11: The Luminate product teams have been working hard over the last year on Lumiante Next Gen. The first iteration is now widely available and provides easy access to powerful metrics and a beautiful dashboard experience to find data that you used to have to dig and find. More capabilities coming soon.
10:12: A video plays featuring the National Kidney Foundation. "Being an early adopter is FUN." They love to see when Blackbaud takes their feedback into consideration and makes changes based on it. "The transparency that they provide us is a game changer." Because NKF have data all in one place, it's much easier to pull the data they need and consult with their staff on results from events locally and nationwide. "Another helpful feature is that the dashboards help measure retention" which was really hard to pull earlier and took multiple reports. Now it's right there on the dashboard. Now the NKF can make real-time data driven decisions to help sustain their growth.
10:15: "In summary, we're making good better." And there's more announcements coming. Make sure you check out the roadmap sessions to learn more about what's coming.
10:16: "Know that we are going big. REALLY big." Let's take a look at what that looks like. The philanthropy sector is BIG, but with the power of the cloud we're going to make it easier to coordinate with orgs, corporations, individuals, and more. As an example, when a devastating earthquake hits, the cloud-connected ecosystem could coordinate disaster relief efforts like medical supplies, transportation, shelters and beyond. This is the ecosystem of good that we're trying to build, to change the way we give, respond and work together both locally and globally.
10:19: "What you've seen today is just the beginning." With that, Kevin signs off and that's a wrap for the Day 2 keynote!
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10/27/2016 11:23am EDT
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