Just a reminder that MatchFinder was updated the week of November 6. In The Raiser's Edge, you can download the update to refresh your MatchFinder database files. Remember that your MatchFinder Online service is updated daily so you'll always see the most up to date details for matching gift corporations out there.

For more info on updating MatchFinder in The Raiser's Edge review Knowledgebase solution BB414650.

Erin McHugh Saif, Target Analytics Product Manger, was recently feautured in Philanthropy Journal sharing ideas that help nonprofits reach their long-term fundraising goals.

"Fundraisers everywhere are being asked to implement bold strategies to ensure program stability. Add to the mix the fact that donor and prospect information changes at lightning speed, and you can understand why fundraising professionals are feeling anxious. Organizations that have implemented analytics and prospect research best practices are weathering this environment better than most. Good use of analytics brings stability to the development office, builds accountability with leadership and board members, and successfully uncovers new prospects with strong affinity for your mission." Read the entire Philanthropy Journal article.

Several times a week, we offer free, hour-long web seminars on our website. The seminars usually focus on Blackbaud products or best practices for nonprofits.

To register, select Web Seminars from the Events menu on our website, find a seminar you want to attend, and click Register Now. Once you submit the enrollment form, you’ll receive an email with instructions for viewing the online presentation, as well as the telephone access number. If you’d like to enroll for additional seminars, click Continue after you fill out the enrollment form.

Here are some of the web seminars coming up next week:

November 10:
There Ought to Be a Law: Best Fundraising Practices We Probably Don’t Practice, 3:00 p.m. ET: Learn how to break away from practices that are less than the best and seek new levels of success for your organization.

November 11:
Maximize Reach and Revenue with "Friends Asking Friends" Online Events, 1:00 p.m. ET: Join us to see how Blackbaud Sphere Events makes it easy to set up and run one event or hundreds, through standalone microsites or fully integrated into your current website.

November 12:
Social Networking Strategy for Nonprofits, 2:00 p.m. ET: We'll answer the key questions you need to understand this important trend, evaluate projects and opportunities within your organization, and participate in the process of constructing your own social networking strategy.

Time to Upgrade – Moving Beyond Blackbaud NetSolutions, 2:00 p.m. ET: Join us to learn about Blackbaud's Internet Solutions and how they can provide you with all the functionality you currently have, but with a more up-to-date look and feel, plus added functionality.

November 13:
Uncover Your Best Prospects with Target Analytics, 2:00 p.m. ET: Target Analytics offers powerful tools to provide you the up-to-date information you need to find your best prospects and boost fundraising by segmenting prospects to reveal who’s most likely to give.

Have a super weekend!

Faculty Access for the Web comment reviewing allows peers, department heads, administrators, or advisors to review and approve teachers' gradebook comments before they are posted to The Education Edge. It's like having your own staff of editors to ensure you deliver the highest quality and most accurate comments! Let's take a closer look:

Before staff can review and approve comments, you must complete the following:

1. Decide who will have rights to review. To give a faculty member rights to comments, mark the appropriate school checkboxes on his record's Restrictions 1 tab.
2. Assign the appropriate group of reviewers for each school. The Supervisor selects the group on the Miscellaneous page in Faculty Access for the Web setup. The following groups are available for review:
   • Peer reviewers are faculty/staff members with rights to access Gradebooks for the school in which a class is taught.
   • Administrators are faculty/staff members whose security records include administrator rights for Faculty Access for the Web. You grant administrator rights by marking the Has administrator rights in Faculty Access for the Web checkbox on the Online Security tab of a user's security record in Administration.
   • Advisors are faculty/staff members with the Current Advisor checkbox marked on the Bio 1 tab of their Faculty/Staff records.
   • Department heads are faculty/staff members whose records list a Position on the Bio 2 tab that matches the position selected for department heads. You can select the position that designates department heads on the NetClassroom Registration Setup page in Configuration and the Miscellaneous page in Faculty Access for the Web Setup.
3. Set up teachers' gradebooks for review.
   • If comment reviewers are based on peer review, teachers must select the faculty members who will review their Gradebook comments:
     1. In Gradebook, click Setup.
     2. Click Reviewer Setup on the navigation bar.
     3. Select the teachers to review the comments. Select Yes in the Can edit column if the teacher can edit comments.
   • To make identifying grades with comments easier, click Customize on the Gradebook page and mark the Indicate Comments Present checkbox.
   • When a comment is ready for review, teachers must change the Comment Status on the comment screen to Ready for Review.

Now that comment review is set up, it's time to get those comments report card ready! To review comments, the reviewer teacher logs into Faculty Access for the Web, selects Gradebook, and then clicks the Comment Approval tab. He can review comments by Course, Teacher, or Student. If he has edit rights, he can edit the comment in Comment box, or, if he only has reviewer rights, he can enter his comments in the Reviewer's Notes box.

To complete the review process, the reviewer teacher changes the comment status to Approved and then saves and closes the comment.

Hey blog readers!  We are often asked why Accounts Payable users are not able to update a vendor tax ID, so I thought this would be a helpful topic to talk about today. 

Beginning in The Financial Edge version 7.70 we implemented personal information security.  This additional security option allows you to specify which users can view and edit information such as Social Security Number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and vendor tax IDs.  To ensure this personal information is secure, the personal information options are not marked when you create a new security group or update from a version prior to 7.70.  

To be able to update the field, adjust the Shared Component Personal Information options in the users' security group.  For complete steps, take a look at Knowledgebase solution BB181316.

Make sure you only assign rights to personal information for users that need to access it in order to perform their job. If you are not sure what rights are appropriate, check out What is Blackbaud's recommendation for personal information best practices?

Talk to you soon!

On more than one occasion, you've probably asked yourself (or a customer support analyst) "...what is the difference between The Researcher's Edge and ProspectPoint? What about ResearchPoint and WealthPoint? Well, what services does my organization have? I'm confused..." We hear you and want to make your experience with Target Analytics much less confusing. Over the past few years, we've undergone some changes here at Blackbaud. From Blackbaud Analytics to Target Analytics, a Blackbaud Company, we've created new partnerships through acquisitions and mergers, and our product menu has changed to meet the needs of our nonprofit customers. Because we do offer different products and services, depending on your organizational goals and needs, we want to make sure you're clear on the products you're currently using.

WealthPoint (wealth screening services): How well do you know your donors and prospects? Could you report on their salaries, private business and public stock holdings, real estate purchases, and other wealth characteristics in a matter of minutes? If not, that's where Target Analytics steps in to assist in your research efforts. Oh WealthPoint, how we love thee. WealthPoint has many faces; you've seen it in The Raiser's Edge and The Researcher's Edge, where you can run searches on your prospects and donors. In ResearchPoint, search from a prospect record (receive auto-refresh of data sources) and run searches for groups of records at a time. If you don't use Blackbaud software, we can even return a file with the results of your wealth screenings (to be imported into your fundraising system). Many organizations employ our wealth screening services by sending us large lists for batch screenings, and other use a subscription to screen donors and prospects at their own page.

So, to recap, WealthPoint is an asset and philanthropic history tool that allows you to plug in names and addresses to find many different wealth data points. Learn more about our wealth data sources. Check back for other posts in the series, including WealthPoint OnTime, custom modeling, and ResearchPoint.

Later today I'll be hosting a webinar called "The State of Online Fundraising" as part of NTEN member appreciation month. It's free to NTEN members and Blackbaud customers.

My presentation is full of lots of information, metrics, benchmarks, and more. Below are some of the reports, research, and links that I reference during the session:

• 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis
• Giving USA Report for 2008 and Online Fundraising Estimates
• 2008 Online Giving Trends
• 2009 Online Giving Trends - Q1
• 2009 Online Giving Trends - Q2
• 2009 Online Giving Trends - Q3
• Does Online Cannibalize Offline Fundraising
• Are Twitter and Facebook Important to Event Fundraising?
• 2009 eNonprofits Benchmark Study
• Index of National Fundraising Performance

These links should give you plenty to think about and take action on when building better online fundraising programs. And here are my slides from the presentation:

I'm looking forward to other sessions like this in the future.

New Batch Types

We significantly improved the data import process in this release, including the ability to edit or append constituent data, modeling scores, educational history, and giving summary information.

To accommodate these improvements, we added several new batch types:

• Constituent Update Batch: Updates and adds records based on information included in an import file or batch. When importing, to identify existing records, the import process compares the record ID included in the import file to system lookup IDs and alternate lookup IDs.
• Modeling and Propensity Update Batch: Updates constituent modeling and propensity data based on information included in an import file or batch.  When importing, to identify existing records, the import process compares the record ID included in the import file to system lookup IDs and alternate lookup IDs.
• Giving Summary Update Batch: Updates constituent giving history data based on information included in an import file or batch.  When importing, to identify existing records, the import process compares the record ID included in the import file to system lookup IDs and alternate lookup IDs.
• Education History Update Batch: Updates constituent education history data based on information included in an import file or batch. This batch type also allows you to update spouse education information. When importing, to identify existing records, the import process compares the record ID included in the import file to system lookup IDs and alternate lookup IDs.

All four batch types are available in Batch Entry. For more information, see the Batch Entry and the Import chapters in Data Management.

New Fields in Query

• The Prospect manager, Research status, WealthPoint search date, and WealthPoint updates enabled fields are now available in Query.

Research Group Report Added

• You can now prepare and print prospect research reports for all members of a research group.

Automatic Logout Disabled

• In ResearchPoint 1.6, we disabled the automatic logout feature to improve usability. To ensure data security and privacy, application users do need to make sure they close their Web browser after using ResearchPoint on a public machine.

We want to know how you use the Forums - please take our poll in Forums Feedback.

Here are last week's most popular Forums posts as well as unanswered posts:

Most Popular Topics:

• Constituent Codes in a batch
• Analytical Report
• Edit Setup After Batch has been committed
• Tracking event attendance without Event Module
• transferring to a letter the info found in a donor category report (for donor recognition wall)

Unanswered Posts:

• Membership Reports
• Papersave
• New Indexes and Performance Issues
• Tracking Disqualified Giving for IRS Form 990
• Report Giving From Disqualified Persons IRS Form 990
• NetMembers: Gift of Membership

Obviously, everyone has enjoyed shopping in one form or another whether it is on-line or in a regular store. From the early part of this decade until last year the on-line shopping statistics were growing rapidly. They are still growing but the pace has slowed according to Forrester Research. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the recent results in the on-line shopping world is that the average transaction has dropped slightly.

I truly believe that on-line shopping will swing back into high growth mode again next year. It will hard to stop it with the large growth occurring in broad band usage as shown below.

Such stats and insights are important to know for any non-profit organization with a web site presence. (Let's hope the percentage of NPO's with web sites is now near 100%!)

The reason I say it is vital to know, is due to the key role shopping can play in increasing the bond between your constituents and your NPO. Any of your supporters who have embraced your mission are more than likely to want to display their loyalty via items with your logo or cause outlined. In addition, this can be a superb auxiliary source of revenue for your non-profit.

Earlier this year eTapestry made this potentially key part of many of our customer's web sites come to life via our new shopping cart module. This great addition to our product line provides an easy way to sell any type of product via the web site with all important data flowing directly into the eTapestry database. It also automates all transaction processing while providing appropriate receipts and follow-up emails. Appropriately it is a one-stop shop for non-profits requiring this functionality!

Make It Right Foundation

National Railroad Museum

Hopefully we can help many of you make this additional relationship building and revenue generating tool come to life!

The Q3 documentation survey results have been compiled. Here are some of the key stats:

We received 183 responses.
For our five overall rating categories - Accuracy, Completeness, Easy to Understand, Accessibility, and Usefulness - the two most frequent ratings were a 4 and 5 (out of 5).
Our highest overall rating category was ‘Accuracy’ (mean 4.30).
Our lowest overall rating category was ‘Easy to Understand’ (mean 3.98).
86.3% of survey respondents access documentation often or sometimes.
47.5% of survey respondents prefer to access documentation as user guide PDFs online.

Additionally, we have begun tracking user guide downloads with Google Analytics. This quarter we had 25,145 downloads from our User Guide pages. That number includes our user guides, video tutorials, and print tutorials. The number does not include hits on our hosted BBNC help files, which we track separately by topic.

And last but not least, each quarter we enter the respondents of our survey in a drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. The Q3 winner for 2009 was Heather Flynn of Olive Crest Homes and Services for Abused Children. Congratulations, Heather!

To take the survey (and be entered in our 2009 fourth quarter drawing), click here. It takes only a few minutes. To send us feedback about our user guides or help file documentation at any time, email documentationcomments@blackbaud.com.

OK, who's ready to get their #bbcon on?

Cool, I'm glad you're with me! Using social media at events feels like it has become the norm. That said, if you're still getting your feet wet when it comes to tweets and hashtags, a tech event like Blackbaud's Conferene for Nonprofits is a great place to practice what you've been learning.

Be sure to check out the Conference Social Media Guide for details on how to use Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and other services while at the event. In the mean time, here are a few things you can do today that will help you get connected with other attendees, speakers, exhibitors, and Blackbaud staff.

• RSVP to the BBCon Facebook page.
• Follow @BBCon on Twitter.
  
• Tell everyone you're coming to the Conference via Twitter: "I can't wait to be in Charleston at Blackbaud's Conference for Nonprofits! #bbcon".
• Tweet using the #bbcon hashtag to join the conversation
• Connect with some of the Conference speakers on Twitter, here and here.
  

As the conference progresses, you can share your photos via Flickr or useful links via Delicious (use the tag "bbcon" for both). We also have a Conference discussion forum available for ride sharing, hotel questions, and networking. And finally, we'll be rolling out content via this blog over the next couple weeks, so be sure to add the feed to your reader.

Oh, and while you're here, are you interested in some shameless promotion? If you want to learn more about how your nonprofit can use social media to meet your objectives, check out the two-part skill workshop I'm doing with Melanie Mathos. We're covering 50 social media tactics in the first session, followed by a 40-seat workshop where you'll get to practice what you learned.

I'll see you online! 

The Distance Learning team is so excited to have a new member, so please join me in welcoming Marianna Ridley. Marianna's role is Distance Learning Designer and her primary responsibilities are to design and develop instructor-led and self-paced learning materials.

In this post, we get to know Marianna!

Question: What can you tell us about this picture?

Answer: In late August, I started graduate school at Boise State University.  I am not a big fan of college football, but my husband is, and he got me a jersey. I don't pay too much attention to games, but I do love the blue field.

Question: Where do you live (state/country)? 

Answer: I live in beautiful Charleston, SC, where the winters are superb. (I am originally from Brooklyn, NY, where the winters are the opposite of superb: cold, cold, long, and cold.)

Question: What is your favorite thing to do when you aren't working? 

Answer: I love (a) eating-especially Mexican food, (b) bargain shopping-consignment stores and Goodwill are my close friends, and (c) reading, which is a good thing, because I edit my husband's books. He writes young adult science fiction: http://rwridley.wordpress.com/. 

Question: If you could visit one place in the world, where would you go and why? 

Answer: Italy.  It's my heritage...my maiden name is Della Rocca. (Yep ... Marianna Della Rocca ... way too many syllables. People would fall asleep while I introduced myself!). I took a brief trip there in 1984. I'd love to go back. 

Question: What are your hobbies?  

Answer: See #3 above .  Also, I make beaded jewelry, and my husband and I watch a lot of movies.  (Yes, I'll admit it, I actually enjoyed Zombieland.)

Question: How long have you been at Blackbaud? 

Answer: It's been a decade!  

Question: What inspired you to work at Blackbaud? 

Answer: I really wanted to work for a company that asked "Why do the hands on a clock move clockwise?" on its employment test.

Question: What do you love most about your position at Blackbaud? 

Answer: The chance to keep learning new things. I took the StrengthsFinder test, and Learner is in my top five. For any Meyers-Briggs aficionados out there, I'm an ESFJ. 

Question: What is your professional background?

Answer: At Blackbaud, I have been a customer support analyst, technical writer, information specialist, and courseware developer. Before Blackbaud, I wore a number of hats. For example, I was a proofreader, band manager (does anyone remember the local band Cejema?), sales rep, and, once upon a time, I stuffed envelopes at a bank.

Question: Is there anything else you would like to share? 

Answer: I am thrilled to be a member of the Distance Learning team!  My graduate program is in instructional and performance technology, with a focus on elearning, so it's a great fit.  Two other things: (1) Every single interaction I have had with people on the team has been truly fabulous. I know I will love working with you. (2) Everyone on the team is thrilled to be on the team. The synergy must be amazing!   

Marianna, I speak for myself as well as members of the Distance Learning team when I say we are thrilled to have you with us. Thank you for sharing some of yourself with us and we look forward to getting to know you better.

Until next time!  

Blackbaud — The Financial Edge