Third party vendor managing monthly donors in RE?

Rebecca Goldfinger

Hi, Blackbaud Community - we are using RE (Web View whenever possible and Database View when not), and we are looking into contracting with an outside vendor to manage contacting our lapsed monthly donors (sustainers) and setting up new monthly donors. Does anyone out there do this who would be willing to share:

*Do you have your third party vendor have full write access to your Raiser's Edge, so that they can create Actions on all the constituent records where they conduct outreach? Or does your third party vendor send you a data file?

*How do you manage changes to the sustainer list - does the third party vendor use Raiser's Edge to track these changes? Or do they have an external system that then needs to communicate with Raiser's Edge?

If anyone has a workflow that you think works well, I'd love to learn about it.

Thanks very much for your consideration,

Rebecca Kemp Goldfinger

Sr Development Database Associate

Reading Is Fundamental

Karen Diener

I don't have a lot of recent hands-on experience with this exactly, but have worked with RE customers who work with vendors in similar ways. The two I most recently worked with allow access for their direct marketing firms for list-pulling reasons. Each has expressed some level of concern that the lists may not be accurate, but the decision also seems to be out of their hands so they focus on what they can control.

I have never worked with a customer who allows a third-party to make data updates or add actions. That is most often done by sharing a file of actions to add, or providing constituent updates in some other way. If you take that route, provide an import template to the vendor and make them fit the data into that. Constituent updates are tricky and you will probably need to update them manually. There is no easy way to provide a template for that because you may not know what is being updated. I am assuming that this would include contact information and maybe solicit codes?

If you do allow them access, it would never be "full write access". That would not be required. Give them only the access that is needed to perform their tasks - much like any other staff person - and monitor the data entry on an ongoing basis. Honestly, I would review things daily. You can probably create queries for that.

I've never known of a vendor having a system that would communicate directly with RENXT and I would be very skeptical of allowing that.

I know that might not be exactly what you were looking for but I hope it is helpful in some way!

Rebecca Goldfinger

Thanks so much for this information! Sorry for the belated reply. I appreciate your taking the time to respond!

All best wishes,

Rebecca

Robin Kuehn

We've been working with a third-party vendor for outreach for our capital campaign. They do have very limited access to Raiser's Edge, controlled with the security settings in both web and database view. You can get really granular with these, even limiting which records they have access to (based on constituent code). Almost nobody in our organization has sweeping access to all of RENXT; I think most of the access we granted was around creating and editing actions, and doing some reporting. We make sure they don't have the power to delete anything, export data, or alter any gifts or constituent biographical information. If something comes up around these, they have to request further information or changes directly from Staff.

I am way too protective of the database to give them direct access to upload data. Instead I built an excel spreadsheet template for opportunities so they could input new opportunities for me to upload, much like Karen described above. Using data validation helps a lot here - for columns that have to correspond to specific table entries in RENXT, I give them limited choices. I like to create a second sheet on the template called "Validation" where I keep these lists, and use the 'protect sheet' function to keep it from being altered.

I've also made an action import template that I use so I can mass-import actions that our development team makes, like inviting a large group to an event, for example, so I can see that working for your situation. The important thing is to make sure the vendor keeps the name fields separate and constituent record or import ID accurate to what's in the database, since that's where the matching takes place.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

JoAnn Strommen

We have relationships with several 3rd-party vendors. But none that contact our constituents or set up payments. Is vendor creating monthly recurring gift record? How will they know what fund? Are they your payment processor? All of that would require many team discussions if we were considering.

We do have vendor we've used for several years now that is doing the type of work that RE NXT is getting to for portfolios: identifying needed contact, generating sample emails, suggesting actions… This part is working fine - they are linked to RE - nightly data transfers. They do not add actions - dev staff do that.
The alumni arm of their services does have function to upload email/phone/city-state data into RE for linked constituent. It required new data types and has created more clean up. While we need the updated info, there are definitely pros and cons.

We work with other partners but they do not have access to upload data and work with data we provide to them.

Rebecca Goldfinger

Thank you, Robin and JoAnn for your input! It's definitely helpful to see what other people are doing.

Best,

Rebecca