My Community - Open public forum

Corrine Duncan

I just found out that this is a open and public forum. I believed it to be just for those that worked in the Blackbaud products. We are in the process of moving our parents to BBID and noticed that the community forum was showing to them as well. For those schools that have moved over to BBID for their parents, have you had any feedback from parents on the community?

Bryna Gleich

I haven't noticed many parents in the community, although I know it's possible for them to reach here if they really want to.

The discussion areas would probably currently be a bit boring for most of them since they aren't staff, but, hypothetically, we could add a discussion area for them if they were interested in one.

Parents who volunteer to help the schools may find some discussions interesting though. For example, if a parent is a volunteer athletic coach and they want to get advice from other users with the coach role, they could get that advice here.

And some users might be both parents and paid school staff, so they'd likely find the community helpful for their staff responsibilities.

The community is open to anyone who makes a BBID account, including current users, prospective customers, third party developers for the API, and more.

If you know of parents who are active in the user community, they might enjoy adding to the Idea bank.

Corrine Duncan

Bryna,

Thank you for your response. I could not find anywhere information that it is an open forum and I really thought that this area was for those of us that use the blackbaud products on the back end to be able to connect with each other on back end use. I think it can be awkward at times for parents to see a post from an employee of the school that is questioning an issue they are having or even may possibly be not giving a favorable light to a blackbaud product. Also, it could additional create some added work on back end users regarding products or internal policies and the process for that particular schools use. For us we do not have coaches using the system that intently and we provide full training for them. We do the same for other areas of our community. We find a centralized location for us works and it would be great if we could set our publish settings for areas more granularly to accommodate our processes. This also relates to case central too but that is drawing away from this point.

I previously participated in this forum because I believed it was a way to connect with other back end users of the system who had specific employee based roles with the schools. Knowing that this is an open forum with anything that I post or reply is visible to all, I will no longer be using this area.

I think it would be most helpful to in the very least have an ability to turn off an on per company/school or to have the forums segmented to those that are employees and those that are parents.