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Stewardship Management & Reporting

Christy Skeens

Hi there,

Would anyone be willing to chat about their experience with reporting? We are looking to go digital and wondered if this might be a good option. Looking to get a few samples of what a report through BAM might look like.

Thanks!

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Stewardship Management

Comments

Edna Barker

It would be great if someone would be willing to do a zoom meeting to talk about this.

Angela Tuttle

I am interested in this as well.

Rebecca Brado

We currently use BAM but have not found it to be user-friendly or able to meet our needs effectively. I'm afraid if I hopped on a Zoom to discuss this topic my frustration would show through. Most recently customer service was unable to help me come to a useful resolution about data we need for scholarship impact reports not showing up in the post-acceptance report due to a lot of factors outside of my control or not easily identifiable.

I also find it incredulous that BAM doesn't talk to RE even though they're both Blackbaud products. We store our scholarship recipients in BAM but our scholarship contacts in RE, so we have to pull and merge the data from two sources (bonus: cleaning up the weird characters that export instead of certain punctuation marks).

The process of completing scholarship impact reports took me 6-8 weeks last year (including envelope stuffing) and it's almost time to launch that project again. This year I'm working on digital delivery, perhaps via ThankView or ODDER. And I'm grateful our institution is exploring another scholarship management software (Kaleidoscope).

Marilee Abramshe

Hi,

So, I attempted to use the reporting process for Impacts and found there were several things that didn't work for me - though they could work for others. First, the ability to change the layout and design is constrained. You will need to accept their design with only modest changes made. Second, the ability to individualize what information goes on which reports is a plus but the process of setting up the software to do so is clunky, not user friendly and can ultimately be time consuming depending on the individualization you need. Since I only do this process once a year, it's like reteaching myself over and over again and if you forget a step upon setting up a new fund or amending a fund, then you have to play catch up. Lastly, though they added the ability to attach a cover letter, this too is not straight forward as creating, lets say, a word document. The end result for me - I'm able to pull a post acceptance report, cut, sort, organize and merge into a document with the cover letter, designed to meet my needs with more ease then if I used the reporting process in BAM. If you have the time and resources and the ability to set up your process and maintain it, then it might work for you. I might suggest creating a list of priorities: what do you need this process to do for you? 1. flexibility with design and messaging 2. resources (time and talent) at your disposal vs. what is needed to set up and maintain the software process 3. your ability to conform to a software vs. the software meeting all of your needs. 4. Volume of reports needed. BAM is a good program but it meets the needs of organizations of all different sizes with different sets of resources. Some are small some are gargantuan. The number of reports, size of your team and flexibility of the program will all play a factor into how well this reporting system works for you. For me (a team of 1 for the whole thing cycle set up to awarding to impacts) with about 350-400 scholar awards and about 130-150 funds, it's a challenge with time when I factor in the rest of my job. For someone with more time, more people, or more straight forward funds/reports it might be exactly what they need. Not the answer you were seeking but perhaps one that will provide food for thought.

Edna Barker

This is our first year with BBAM. I really like it for scholarships, and we are using it for some reporting to donors. We have not really gotten into that yet. We also use RE, so we too have to export our data from BBAM via an excel spreadsheet, but I have not found that to be too difficult because we clean up the data in Excel and then import it in to RE. Are you familiar with RE imports?

Catherine Terrones

We've been on BBAM for a couple of years and have just completed our implementation of BB Stewardship Management (donor portal). We are not RE users; we use Elucian CRM for our donor database.

I'm happy to share our experience and what our reports look like.

Message me if you're interested and we can set up.

Cathy Terrones

cterrones@sdsu.edu

Emily Savino

@Edna - where do you put the data you extract from BBAM into Raiser's Edge?

Edna Barker

Hi,

I do a constituent import.from Excel.

Amy Carcanagues

Edna Barker‍ do you have any information on how to set that import up? We are trying top get data imported into BBAM because we need to try to create donor reports. We cannot seem to get the fields populated for fianncial activity. We cannot understand what step we are missing in the documentation!

Edna Barker

Hi Amy, In my post, I was referring to pulling data out of BBAM and then creating a csv spreadsheet where I import data into RE. If you are trying to import data into BBAM, here is some information on how to do that:

Work with user imports

Your user import contains applicant data from another system (e.g., student information system) that's important to your awarding process.

Go to Site, Settings, User Imports to set up your user import to improve data quality and streamline the application process.

Upload user imports

Set up an automated user import

To set up an automated user import using cURL, go to Site, Settings, Import & Export Tools.

For more technical documentation, go to Site, Settings, Import & Export Tools, select API Documentation under Export Details at the bottom of the page.

Manually upload an import file

Only System Administrators (and IT Administrators) have access to manually upload an import file.

Navigate to Site, Settings, User Imports.

Under User Import CSV, choose your .CSV file.

Select Update Settings.

Edna Barker

@Emily Savino, I import it into the constituent record in RE.