Using Blackbaud as a central communication hub for non-parents?

Nathan Ong

Hello,

Our director floated an idea to me that I was wondering if it were possible for Blackbaud. We'd like to have a central hub to communicate any announcements, upload any files/notes etc. for our School Board.

As an example, if there's a Board meeting, then those meeting notes would be uploaded onto Blackbaud for board members to see. Meeting links etc. added to the Blackbaud calendar so when board members log in they have everything.

Currently it's a mix of sharing files/links on Google Drive and emails which makes tracking files difficult. I tried to test this with a personal account though I get logged into a parent page to view student.

Parent stuff aside, can this be done?

Kathy Hannon

@Nathan Ong we have our Trustees set up as a Community Group where we “house” all that information - there's a Topic for each Committee, meeting notes & Board Projects. The agendas are posted in the Announcements and trustees are encouraged to “turn on” the announcement notifications in their settings. We also have a Coaches group that we manage the same way - most of our coaches aren't parents.

Petra Hall

@Nathan Ong We also have our Board of Directors and committees set up as various Community Groups. I've seen access to the groups set up two ways:

(1) Clone the Trustee role to each of your “executive” Community Groups, assign the cloned roles as appropriate, and set the Community Groups to automatically update their rosters based on the roles.

(2) Manually invite/remove members - then impersonate the new members and accept their invitations for them because accepting the invitation involves clicking tiny text in an not-obvious location, and we want our board/committee members not to be turned back at the gate.

While (2) seems much easier, issues with accepting the invitation has caused people to stop interacting with the database.

To control access to their downloads, we use a restricted Downloads category set up through Core > Additional Content Types > Downloads.

Nathan Ong

@Kathy Hannon thanks! It's great to hear it's being used that way!

Nathan Ong

@Petra Hall Thank you. Good point on the invitation part, since some of the board members are not as tech savvy.