Fundraisers working within NXT rather than Excel files

Jeannie Goings

We are fairly new to RENXT and have had some challenges with fundraiser adoption. I'm wondering if there are any front-line fundraisers out there or any trainers who might provide suggestions for user adoption. The common complaints: web view is clunky; need to see action, gift, proposal, and constituent information in one view; need to color code my work and have a visual representation of follow-up items.

If you are using custom insights to help fundraisers work within the RENXT, or have created lists or dashboards, I'd love to hear about your success and your failures.

Dariel Dixon

This sounds pretty much par for the course. It doesn't matter what the argument is, it's a change that people have to get used to. I think part of the goal is show what new functionality there is, instead of trying to make things a 1::1 replacement. User adoption needs to be driven from leadership and management though, if you are finding resistance. Encourage them to take a look and play in the sandbox for a while, and they may find a feature that works well for them that may open up new possibilities.

Faith Murray

Most of our fundraisers have transitioned well to NXT, given sufficient time. At first, our older users still wanted me to print everything out for them – but, after 2 years I've been able to celebrate our front line users entering their own actions and notes (mostly). No one has asked me to print a constituent Profile for over a year now.

• I advise them to move their Notes, Actions, and Proposals tiles to the top on constituent records. From your Security areas in webview and database view, you can also remove access to tiles that are just “clutter” information for them.
• I also have custom lists to pull any major gift that came in this month (for catching new donors off the radar) and one to present a list of all donors in their portfolio. We use the Proposals summary and Actions summaries on their Work Center pages heavily.
• For reports, I use the Fundraising - Reporting to track completed and upcoming actions by solicitor. You can save these views for reports.
• Webview doesn't accommodate Notes in Lists, but as long as Actions are being well used to document progress, then Notes are only really needed when opening up a constituent's record. We used to have a problem where Action information was entered in Notes, and we had to change that habit.
• Color coding should be unnecessary. They can use a Custom field (attribute), the Prospect Status, Opportunity Deadline, Rating, or other field in RE to indicate priority/affinity info.

A lot requires buy-in from your development director. My Director sat in our inaugeral major gifts meetings and gave support as I presented a series of short training sessions on how to enter actions and notes, and where to find their upcoming Actions lists in their Fundraiser work center. They need to understand that they may be wasting your time and their own time by moving everything into excel and then back in again.

That being said, there are times when an excel list has to happen. When your committee needs to do a collective review of 500 records for campaign planning, and not everyone is a staff member with RE access. When you're exporting for a solicitation mail merge and then have to re-upload as an Action or Appeal. When you have 150 Christmas cards to write out for your portfolio and all you want is salutation and mailing address so you don't have to look back and forth at a screen. But this shouldn't be for daily work or prospect tracking.

Karen Diener

Regardless of what you can set up to make things easier - and Faith has some great suggestions in her post - I've found that it all comes down to management's enforcement. I've seen staff-wide adoption happen more quickly and more completely in organizations where management relies on the information in RE more than any other source.

All “official” reports that might have to do with dollars raised, actions completed, or any other metric should come only from RE. Extra bonus if managers use the database themselves! The somewhat tiresome statements of “if it isn't in the database it didn't happen” and “lead by example” apply here.

There is compromise for sure! Not all reporting from RE is helpful, and we cannot expect organizations to completely change the way they do business in order to match how Blackbaud has decided they should operate. But it does not typically mean you should be tracking information completely outside of your database.

Karen

Jeannie Goings

@Faith Murray, @Dariel Dixon, @Karen Diener thank you for sharing. Very helpful and as suspected. #community