Blackbaud changing user titles

Rosalyn Galloway

I just happened to look at my audit history under Security and noticed that on January 29, 2025, 11:50 pm user titles were changed for our users, and some have reverted back to old titles. When I look at the entry to see who made the change, it says Blackbaud. We also noticed that email categories have changed for people as well as addresses. Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

JoAnn Strommen

@Rosalyn Galloway Just checked, yes see the same thing. Looking at audit, all changed and for a few who had a previous title, it's showing previous title.
Not sure where you are looking at email categories/addresses so can't speak to those.

Karen Diener

Interesting! I'm seeing the same “title changed” message from January 28 at 10:14 pm. I can't see how his would impact me on a daily basis, but I do have concerns about these kinds of automated changes.

JoAnn Strommen

@Karen Diener Exactly, don't think it impacts either but why. Ours were Jan 27, 9:33 pm. If our university Chief of Staff does go in and sees her title before several promotions she'll be calling me. LOL.

Dan Snyder

@Rosalyn Galloway
1/28/2025, 11:35 PM for us, but similar to @Karen Diener and @JoAnn Strommen I am not sure this will impact our work. It is only me and my supervisor with access to this area and I am really the only one to go in anyway .

Rosalyn Galloway

@Dan Snyder
I'm not that concerned about the changes to titles. I'm also seeing changes in data where email types are changing. My boss' mailing address changed from her home address to her campus address and no one on our staff made the change. She only noticed it when we did a mailing, and it came to her via campus mail. One another occasion, an alum notified us that she received email correspondence via an older email account that she occasionally uses and because we communicate with her frequently, we know something is amiss.

Faith Murray

@Rosalyn Galloway

I looked all over in RE to see where job title is even a field, because I certainly didn't enter it for our staff. It doesn't exist in their RE constituent record, or as a field under user management. I finally found it under my own profile account, when I click my little initials at the top. It's under “Profile” and “My organizations”. This means that it's not a field that you, the Admin, can change - it's up to the users themselves.

I suspect (never having seen job titles included in Admin before) that this is not a field that already showed and was changed to an older version, but rather a field that was just recently linked from individual user accounts into the audit records process for better accountability. And I can definitely see the security benefit of viewing at-a-glance whether a constituent gift was changed by our Gifts Manager or a Communications specialist.

I'm purely speculating here, but I suspect it's not a problem on BB's end, but is just showing old data that was already needing fixed in your system. Your users probably never updated their profile records when they got promoted. I doubt anybody but you, the Admin, will see this field, but it might be worth an email to your users advising them to update their profiles.

JoAnn Strommen

@Faith Murray I don't know that it's from a user not updating their profile. I see titles that are on their org relationship records before they ever worked in our office and had access to RE. When I created record and account for them I used their title for our office. It's really strange.

Alex Wong

@Rosalyn Galloway
This appears to be an automated process that Blackbaud did for all of us. I see our log changed on 1/26/2025.

My own title has changed since last May I believe and the change is up-to-date to what it is. I am suspecting that this is done through an automation with our SSO connection.

@Erik Leaver or @Ben Wong can verify?

John Vogel

Hi All, I wanted to pop in and provide some clarity on job titles in regards to what's been in place, what's happened recently and future plans.

How have job titles appeared to a user previously?

Anyone associated with an organization was able to visit their User Profile (https://app.blackbaud.com/user/) and edit their job title associated with an organization.

What recently changed?

First off, as part of this change, no one's job titles were overwritten from what we had on file. That is to say we didn't change any job titles for example, from Charitable Giving Director to Weekend Volunteer.

We are in the process of rolling out an update to job titles that will allow admins to provide a job title of anyone they're inviting to the organization. As part of this new workflow, we created a new source of record within product to manage job titles. The Audit events that are being referenced was us hydrating the job titles from the previous source of record that was used to display the job title on the User Profile. The User Profile will also begin leveraging the new product source of record. The prior record source will be used for specific workflows but will be referenced less frequently that today.

In direct in product functionality or experience has changed for any user based on their job title.

What does the future hold?

@Alex Wong, I like where your head is at with the SSO integration. In the future, I do want to allow us to recognize job titles, departments and other key details that can help admins more easily manage their user access and permissions. This a good ways off but we're laying the foundation now by creating our own source of record for job title. If anyone would like to be contacted for discovery efforts in the future around this, please contact me.

All the best,

John

Rob Wild

@John Vogel

That is to say we didn't change any job titles for example, from Charitable Giving Director to Weekend Volunteer.

Except this is exactly what happened to one of our senior directors, you've made him a student landscape architect. He's never been that here at our org, he was appointed as a Director from outside the org.

JoAnn Strommen

@John Vogel I'm with @Rob Wild here. The users with different titles would not have gone in and changed their title to a position they previously had on campus. Some titles are in attributes on org relationships. Others are not in the system at all. When I create user account, profile is created with their position in our office.

How is it that they all changed their title at the exact same time? I'm betting most wouldn't even know how to if I asked them to do it. This was a side-effect of the changes made in the software.

John Vogel

Hi All, I can assure you that we didn't change any job titles with this change. We just hydrated what was already displayed to users within the My Organizations section of their User Profile to our new source of record within User Management. As you've noticed, a number of these job titles are out of date which is part of our intention to raise awareness around. If you have specific examples where a user's title changed as part of this update, then please contact support with the details and we'll investigate accordingly.