Proposed Charter & MOU

Derek Clark

In tomorrow's PAG meeting, we will outline the proposed PAG Charter and new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which have been approved by our sub-committee. Before our revised Charter can become official, it must pass a majority vote by our voting members of the PAG. This vote will begin today and run through Friday, January 26, 2018. In addition, the review committee created a new MOU which is in the final stages of review by Blackbaud. Both the PAG Charter and MOU have been attached in this post. I look forward to sharing this update with you tomorrow and please feel free to chime in during the discussion.

I want to thank all the PAG Charter sub-committee members who gave of their time and intellect to produce these two documents. Our group was a great combination of "old" CRM clients and "new" which came together to strive towards the best document possible. We had some robust dialogue which resulted in, I think, a good end product and direction for our group.

High Level Summary for revised PAG Charter/MOU:

• We are going to remain a Product Advisory Group but also start folding in some “User Group” type functions to better support our membership needs.
• We will continue to focus on the “Blackbaud CRM Suite of Product” (i.e. BBCRM, BBIS, BBDW, BBMS, Target Analytics, Data Enrichment, etc.). So when we say BBCRM we really mean all the products which touch it.
• After the June 2017 election cycle is concluded, our elections will move to every other year. In this next cycle we will elect a Co-Chair and Co-Chair Elect. The top vote getters will be assigned roles and will be in those roles for one year. Once their first year is up, the Co-Chair will move into the Chair role and the Co-Chair Elect will move into the Co-Chair role.
• We have developed a separate Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) which outlines the expectations from Blackbaud and the HE-PAG. We will have this MOU signed and executed by our Chair and Blackbaud. The duration of the document will be from 1/19/2018 unit 7/1/2019 which is the duration of the current election cycle. It is intended, once our new Co-Chair (who will be elected next June) rotates to the role of Chair, they will have a new MOU signed to ensure the new leadership understands and agrees to the expectations.
• PAG membership was limited to two members in the past. We have officially removed this restriction and invite all employees of any Blackbaud CRM client to join our group. We will still only allow 2 votes from any PAG member institution on official votes.
• The MOU includes a formal review expectation at the conclusion of sub-committees to ensure both parties know what to expect once recommendations are made. Basically, Blackbaud is responsible for reporting quarterly updates to the PAG Sub-Committee Chair until both parties agree the recommendations have been addressed (may not necessarily mean they are all completed as suggested).
• Outlined in the MOU how we, the HE-PAG member base, should be included in advisory boards and other Blackbaud groups which include but are not limited to Discovery Sessions, other Product Advisory Boards, Executive Advisory Groups, and non-profit industry direction discussions.
• Minor Changes Include:

o   Added “Higher Education” and “Blackbaud CRM” to our name.

o   Removed sections for “Higher Education Advisory Board” and “Knowledge Sharing Forums” from the document.

o   Concluded and confirmed all Blackbaud CRM customers should be afforded the opportunity to be part of our PAG group regardless of whether they purchase an annual maintenance/support from Blackbaud.

o   Added a section for periodic review of this charter when warranted.

Look forward to talking to the entire PAG soon!


Derek