Integration Issues with 3rd Party Platforms

Noah Wilson
Noah Wilson
Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Over the years as we've used various third party platforms for fundraising, I've found that integration often involves a rock and a hard place and I was wondering if anyone has any advice or wisdom they could share on the topic.

While it is commonplace for platforms to offer prebuilt connectors that save the time of mapping fields over to RE, this doesn't solve one of the fundamental time-sinks involved with integration which is linking a constituent in the platform to a constituent in RE. A person seems to be left with two choices: take the time to manually link each transaction to the correct constituent (which can regularly take most of the morning when an event is in full swing, which takes away from other data entry tasks that also need to be done) or simply push the data into RE, duplicates and all, which undermines reporting and requires the time investment anyway to do the deduping and merging after the fact. We've looked at using an alias in RE as a way to identify people, but that tends to fall apart for annual events where a constituent only goes in once a year to make a donation or buy tickets (they often just create a new account which then has to be re-linked).

Thank you in advance for any insights or advice!

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 Facilitator 3 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Noah Wilson
    you are spot on with the “delimma” of 3rd party platform data into RE NXT. it's always a trade offs between complete data correctness where a human is doing more work or trading off some correctness and let automatching does its thing.

    ultimately is about how smart the logic of auto matching is from the donor entered data vs the RE NXT data. Name, Email, Phone, and Address are the main pieces of data use in matching. Some integation are better such that it “normalize” the name and address data first before comparing, resulting in better match that doesn't need human involvement.

    Another key is duplicate management. We can go with the “less data correct” route when you have a good duplicate management process in place with the good tool. Blackbaud is finally making changes to its RE NXT web merge tool, which has improved a lot from previous. It is also going to have more enhancement coming up shortly (per PUB and BBcon). So you can feel better to let the auto match does its job, so freeing a lot of human intervention, and then a “mass merge” to happen at an interval that is acceptable.

  • Noah Wilson
    Noah Wilson
    Seventh Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Alex Wong Thank you very much for the insight! (And also for clarifying that I'm not the only one running into this.) This gives me a better way to structure my thoughts when evaluating the pros and cons in this process.

    Also, I've greatly enjoyed watching your sessions on the use of Power Platform from DevDays and BBCON. I've been learning and using BI for a bit now and am hoping to carve out some time to start learning Power Automate this year.

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