Blackbaud Is Committed To Your Success!

Chris Singh

Learn how Blackbaud has been preparing for GivingTuesday and the year-end fundraising season.

Hi Blackbaud Community,


Kevin McDearis and I sent the following communication out this morning via email, but I wanted to also post it here in Community to ensure that all our valued Blackbaud customers see it. Good luck tomorrow and throughout the rest of the giving season. We are proud to be your partner.

– Chris Singh, SVP, Customer Success


We are excited that GivingTuesday is tomorrow, which kicks off the year-end giving season. We recognize how important it is for your donors to have a seamless, stable experience when making a donation to your organization’s worthy cause. 


We want to assure you that we have the teams and resources in place to ensure that happens. Please know we take the stability of our solutions seriously, and it is our commitment that those solutions are reliable and able to provide the service you deserve. We’ve taken several steps behind the scenes to be sure GivingTuesday and end of year giving are successful efforts for you. 


We recently implemented a freeze period across our solutions and environments, which means we will restrict any updates we deploy to critical items only, to further ensure the stability of your solution. We have also increased the level of monitoring and alerting tools that will alert us of a potential issue before it affects you. We have completed extensive load testing to ensure our systems are able to handle high email volume and page bandwidth. 

 

For GivingTuesday specifically, in addition to those steps above, we will have a dedicated team—consisting of engineers, Customer Support representatives, and communications experts—in place whose sole focus is ensuring a top-notch experience for you. If an issue were to occur, this team will quickly pivot to focusing on providing you with rapid, helpful, and consistent updates on our remediation efforts. 

 

Additionally, if at any time you think something may be happening with your solution, please go to status.blackbaud.com. If you don’t see information there, please connect directly with Blackbaud Customer Support.


This is just a snapshot of the efforts we are making to ensure you experience nothing but success in the weeks ahead. We are committed to your success, and we look forward to continuing our mission of empowering and connecting people to drive impact for social good.


Chris Singh, SVP Customer Success

Kevin McDearis, Chief Products Officer

Carolyn Kotlarski

killing off Crystal Reports at year end - not exactly nice to your clients, hmm?

I understand the decision - it is an old, out of date product, however, your are leaving a lot of clients scrambling with such short notice and at year end for many of us.

John Demarce

Yeah, cutting off RE's only robust reporting option at end-of-year with no notice is a low blow even by Blackbaud's standards.

Br. Michael Fugger

LMS Updates: As stated in this post:

We recently implemented a freeze period across our solutions and environments, which means we will restrict any updates we deploy to critical items only, to further ensure the stability of your solution.

Can the school products division think about implementing a freeze like this at the end of semesters during the school year? I know fund raising is an important component of Blackbaud's business, but we teachers in the trenches have to face irate parents and upset students when grades and GPA's and other associated materials are either inaccessible or no correct because of a snafu in a posted “feature upgrade."

Nick McGinnis

Hope everyone had a great GivingTuesday!

Elizabeth Perron

Hi Br Michael Fugger,

It's Elizabeth the K-12 Community Manager, I have shared your suggestion with a member of our K-12 product management team.

In harmony,

Elizabeth