We’re two weeks into the first month of this 12-month transition. Have you started taking inventory of the processes your team will need to move? Building upon my post from two weeks ago (linked below), this post walks through a practical example to help get your ideas going.
https://lnkd.in/p/gVNmzn9j
Disclaimer: Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental. However, feel free to add them to your Raiser’s Edge NXT sample database if you’re fortunate enough to have one.
Thomas Brady, vice president of advancement at the New English Bucs Foundation, receives a monthly spreadsheet from his RENXT administrator, James Garoppolo. It shows year-to-date campaign revenue by fund and includes columns comparing the results with the same period last year.
To prepare the spreadsheet, James has been running the Comparisons and Summaries report and using its output as his starting point.What should James do next? He should check Blackbaud’s RENXT Features Grid to see whether the report is available in web view. The link is below, but I’ll save you a few clicks this time: Comparisons and Summaries is available in web view, so you and James are good to go.
https://host.nxt.blackbaud.com/renxt-features-grid/
Hopefully, James has documented his current database view process. If he hasn’t, now would be a great time to start. The documentation should cover every step, from opening the saved report and adjusting its parameters to editing the Excel spreadsheet so it looks better for Thomas.
Next, James should run the process in both views. He should find the web view version just as easy to use, if not easier. He will also appreciate the improved process for exporting RENXT output to Excel, which requires fewer steps to produce a polished spreadsheet for Thomas. Other subtle differences—good or bad, depending on whom you ask—will emerge, and those are exactly what James needs to capture in his documentation. He should consider the following factors:
Navigation to the report
Updating parameters
Saving changes
Running and exporting
It will probably make sense to create a table or Excel spreadsheet with the aforementioned factors arranged as rows and the following items used as columns:
Database view steps
Web view steps
Web view Success/Fail or Yes/No
Gap
If Gap, next step to address
Ready to transition to web view (Yes/No)
If no, target date to revisit
My overall assessment is that this process can be transitioned to web view right now.
For those of you attending bbcon, enjoy my favorite city in the entire state of Ohio. And everyone, please keep an eye out for next week’s post, where I’ll cover another scenario—one that isn’t quite so easy.
