Moving to NXT / Easy Wins ?

Alan Mackenzie

Hi, 


We are in the process of moving to NXT in the new year. (Currently Self Host RE7)


I want to make sure we hit the ground running and I thought why not seek the wisdom of the community.


What were your pain points ? 


What were your easy wins for improvements in processes ?


If you had to give a tip what would it be ? 



Thanks 


Alan Mackenzie 


Database Manager 

Perth Children's Hospital Foundation

Western Australia

Brian Davies

We made the same move 18 months ago. One of the early steps is for Blackbaud to take your database and make it a hosted test database, that way you can see how al of your data works in the NXT template and reports. To best use the web interface you may need to change some business practices a little so that data displays correctly in reports and constituent records. For example we had an email and phone type called Primary Email. This was used so that we could easily pull exports with the primary email. In NXT you can use the primary checkbox next to the primary email and it adds a little star. We also used appeals in a more unothodox way and ended up changing it so it worked better with NXTs reporting. On the backend, nothing has changed, so just make sure all of your reports, exports, etc work correctly before going live.

Katherine Mannion

If I had to choose just one pain point and one win...


Win - I think an often overlooked advantage in web view is the predictive analytics that are built in.  The ability to look at your constituents with the simple star system and use that as a springboard for a deeper dive on specific prospects is great, especially for smaller organizations with little budget for prospecting.  


Pain-If your team is used to database view, good luck getting them to switch to web view!  Since ALL the data they're used to getting in database view is not available in web view, it's very frustrating for them and they will resist.


Good luck with your upgrade!

Katherine

Aldera Chisholm

We went live with NXT two weeks before Covid restrictions moved the entire team to a work-from-home model. So a win for us was making it feasible for our team to work remotely much easier than it would have been on RE7. It also helped buy-in. 


Our biggest "win" was perhaps the ease of Gift Entry on NXT - we use database view for 99% of gift entry (because of the convenience of batches and templates), but the members of our team who answer our main-line are now able to quickly jump in and enter a credit card gift without them having to go into database view and deal with batches. We don't get a lot of those gifts, but enough that our team all feels empowered to do it.


The actual conversion was pretty easy, no pain there. But, our pain point is that as NXT evolves, some tasks are better in NXT, some are better in Database View, and it's trial and error to get all our processes set up to account for that. I do find the documentation for NXT a bit lacking - you really need to do the online classes to figure it out. My training documentation has a lot of "If you are sending this kind of email, do it this way, but if it's that kind of email then do it that way, or...."

Barbara Hutson

We converted to RE NXT in July 2017 - from an outside database. The database administration was and still is in RE database. They had conversion issues with creating reports from scratch and pulling mailing lists and getting Head of Household and salutations and addressee issues fixed. Normal conversion stuff. Our old database was not relational - so we lacked employment, family relationships, etc. 

Wins for the major gift team included all of the prospect data being front and center on the constituent records. We had never had prospect status in our old database, so I quickly added those. Gift officers no longer needed printed lists of their managed portfolio, or their Opportunities/proposals. They can now create their own lists - or I share mine with them.

The biggest win, was that the gift officers now add and complete all of their actions: phone calls, meetings, emails, etc. We have so much more information because adding actions in NXT is so easy for them! They can do it from their phone, from a tablet, or from their laptop computer.