Gift notifications?

Charlotte Baker

Hello! I'm about six months into a DBA position at my new job. Today, I heard from one of our major gift officers that the previous DBA had been working on a system that would "ping" her whenever a gift above a certain threshold came in. She seems to think this is a Raiser's Edge feature. 


I'm well versed in scheduled email reports, action notifications, annotations, and so on. I've worked in Raiser's Edge for over six years, including database conversion to RE7 and our upgrade to NXT. I have never heard of a feature that would send an automatic alert when a gift that meets certain criteria is entered into the database.


We already send out a daily gift report with details of all gifts to the entire development team, so I'm not concerned about finding a solution to get her this information as it is already readily available. I've already searched knowledgebase and the community--I'm certain I would have found it by now. So really I'm just looking for validation that this is not a thing that exists so I can honestly say I exhausted my resources  


And... if it does exist... I'm happy to admit that I was wrong!

Karen Diener

Do you have NXT?  Did the MGO explain what she meant by "ping"?


I feel fairly confident saying that there is no standard "out of the box" functionality in database view or web view that would allow anyone to do this in a completely automated fashion.  I hope someone surprises me!


Karen

Charlotte Baker

Karen Diener:

Do you have NXT?  Did the MGO explain what she meant by "ping"?


I feel fairly confident saying that there is no standard "out of the box" functionality in database view or web view that would allow anyone to do this in a completely automated fashion.  I hope someone surprises me!


Karen

Thank you! We do have NXT, and best I can tell the MGO understood that it was possible to get something like a pop-up notification or an email in real-time. It's totally possible that the previous DBA was thinking of a third-party solution, but I'd rather not go down that road.

JoAnn Strommen

Charlotte Baker‍ if you do find out it's there, please be sure to share.  Like Karen Diener‍ I'd like to be surprised.  Thought maybe there was some way to configure a business rule. 

Kevin Hardy

As a developer, one way you can achieve this is by using the Gift List endpoint of the Gift API.
https://developer.sky.blackbaud.com/docs/services/58bdd5edd7dcde06046081d6/operations/ListGifts


With this you should be able to schedule a daily (or whatever interval) pull of gifts for the day, loop through them, and shoot off an e-mail for any gifts that meet your criteria.


I'm a big fan of using the SkyAPI for these types of operations that don't quite exist in the WebView for it's flexibility.

Not sure if this qualifies as "out of the box" ?

Karen Diener

Kevin Hardy‍ I was thinking the same thing when I wrote my reply.  My colleague and I are going to work on that exact thing today.


Charlotte - I'll be in touch as soon as we have something to test.


Karen

Rachel Cavalier

We're not using workflows yet ourselves, but I wonder if this is something that it could take care of? New gifts over a certain amount could get an action added to them assigned to this gift officer?

Elaine Tucker

Kevin Hardy‍ do you have an example of what the results are from the SKY api?  Does this send a consolidated list? what can be included in the list?

Shaun Grace

Rachel Cavalier:

We're not using workflows yet ourselves, but I wonder if this is something that it could take care of? New gifts over a certain amount could get an action added to them assigned to this gift officer?

A workflow can do this.




This would be the criteria (with whatever amount you wanted). The next step would be assigning an action to a fundraiser. The workflow runs at midnight and would assign the action the day following when gifts are processed.


Shaun

 

Kevin Hardy

Elaine Tucker - The Gift List endpoint basically returns a list of gifts and all the information associated with each gift.


Typical gift information returned from an API call might look like this:

(taken from the Gift List documentation page at https://developer.sky.blackbaud.com/docs/services/58bdd5edd7dcde06046081d6/operations/ListGifts)

{<br/>      "id": "492",<br/>      "acknowledgements": [<br/>        {<br/>          "status": "Acknowledged"<br/>        }<br/>      ],<br/>      "amount": {<br/>        "value": 40<br/>      },<br/>      "balance": {<br/>        "value": 0<br/>      },<br/>      "batch_number": "23",<br/>      "constituent_id": "565",<br/>      "date": "2005-05-30T00:00:00",<br/>      "date_added": "2000-05-23T16:16:23.97+00:00",<br/>      "date_modified": "2017-03-15T14:00:12.554+00:00",<br/>      "gift_splits": [<br/>        {<br/>          "id": "1814",<br/>          "amount": {<br/>            "value": 40<br/>          },<br/>          "campaign_id": "6",<br/>          "fund_id": "12"<br/>        }<br/>      ],<br/>      "gift_status": "Active",<br/>      "is_anonymous": false,<br/>      "constituency": "Board Member",<br/>      "lookup_id": "161",<br/>      "payments": [<br/>        {<br/>          "payment_method": "Cash"<br/>        }<br/>      ],<br/>      "post_status": "DoNotPost",<br/>      "receipts": [<br/>        {<br/>          "amount": {<br/>            "value": 30<br/>          },<br/>          "date": "2009-07-13T00:00:00",<br/>          "status": "Receipted"<br/>        }<br/>      ],<br/>      "reference": "Other for Remainder",<br/>      "subtype": "Membership",<br/>      "type": "Other"<br/>    },<br/><br/>Naturally you'd have to have a script to parse the results to extract only the information you need (such as the amount->value) but it really does have everything in there for you.<br/><br/>That being said - if you don't have a programmer (or anyone comfortable with making API calls) available to you, the workflow solution might also work. (haven't tested that myself though)