February 2009 - Posts
Most of my clients (and indeed friends) know how much I look forward to our annual trip in January to Charleston, South Carolina for our division’s conference. Now, a good finger buffet and couple glasses of wine do generally have that affect on me but I wanted blog a little about a few of the many things learnt that helped again make this a highlight of my (new) year. I work in Professional Services, and our team spend their life travelling the country helping ensure Blackbaud clients get the most of their software. We get together once a year, every year, to share advice, best practice and stories from the road.
Once surprise for me was that this year we grew to include 434 team members in the professional services team – our biggest conference ever – bringing together our not-for-profit software implementation experts from Glasgow, London, Charleston (the head office), Cambridge Massachusetts (the Target Analytics team), and San Diego (the former Kintera team). In one activity we found out that we as a team have over 1500 YEARS of pre-Blackbaud not-for-profit experience between us. I was astonished!!
I have to give a big shout out to the Blackbaud Pacific team whom may of us at Blackbaud Europe bonded with as we face so many of the same challenges travelling around a continent interacting with so many fundraising cultures and languages. A picture of a bunch of us together is below and in coming blogs I’ll be writing about some of the great things the Blackbaud Europe folks in that picture (and others!) do. (That’s me in the thicker glasses at the back BTW)
It’s always a highlight for me to hear what Shaun Sullivan (Chief Technology Officer) is doing and this year was no exception. We saw some cool future stuff like some initiatives to help one build custom Infinity forms without using code and what Shaun is trying to make his iPhone do. It made my eyes pop out (not literally of course) and hopefully it’ll be something that we’ll see some more of my team rolling out to users in a couple years time!
BTW – You can check out more cool stuff Shaun and his team are doing at http://labs.blackbaud.com
A speaker I heard for the first time was the very impressive Chuck Longfield, our Chief Scientist, talking about some study he had done in philanthropic patterns and some of his predictions for the future. His thesis looked into how donors are becoming increasing demanding and require the charity to be much more accountable, with these changes identified by sociological study. One interesting pattern he saw was – get this – an increase of direct mail readership and response in younger people because it’s so unusual for them to actually get snail mail!! I’d be interested to see if any UK charities have seen any similar patterns in DM response. Really great to see that this sort of detailed knowledge is informing where we take Blackbaud products over the coming years. I look forward to you and us seeing the benefits in our software usage.
My FAVOURITE thing about the conference though is comparing tips and ideas with the other 433 consultants on how to deliver better training and consulting to our customers. To give you an idea of the outcomes of these sessions on how we work: attendees of classroom training will start to see the benefit of redesigned course manuals in coming months, and hopefully some new training offerings (and I will tell you exactly when they are nearer fruition). Those who take on our consulting will be seeing the benefit of our team increasing our number of product and sector principal consultants – people whose job it is to ensure that we document and share best practice, and therefore deliver better and better services to our customers.
And so “better and better services to our customers” seems like the right note to end my first proper blog on. I’ve got a bunch of things to blog about in coming months like SMS, learning styles, change management as well as some classic Raiser’s Edge stories from the road.
We're doing a bake sale in the office tomorrow Friday 27th February to help raise awareness and funds for the British Heart Foundation for National Heart Month.
I just made some wicked looking brownies (very more-ish indeed) which should hopefully raise a little bit. Eight other team members are also making bakewells and red-coloured cookies, so that we've got more to sell (the concept -as well as matching the red theme of National Heart Month - is to sell them for charity rather than munching too many ourselves!).
If you happen to work in the Waterloo (London, UK) area, you're welcome to email me a shout and I'll give you directions to come and buy some cakes with all proceeds going to this cause - our charity of the month.
Otherwise please do check out (and give at) http://www.bhf.org.uk/red_for_heart_home/campaign_home.aspx
(Yes still haven't improved my link-pretty-making ability yet)
I love the look of the Amazone Kindle 2 - check out the review on http://www.geekbrief.tv/gbtv-519-kindle-2.
It has wifi, and I hope that if it doesn't right now, it includes RSS functionality in the future. It would allow the creation of a continously-refreshed e-ink based newspaper. E-ink is a great technology for the future - it basically is a screen which only draws power when it changes image rather than all the time. Apart from being greener, it also looks like real paper so you don't get that eye-burn you get from a laptop screen. More reading on this at http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/e-ink.htm
For UK readers, Waterstone's (www.waterstones.co.uk) do a version. If you're in a store, get the staff to turn on the demo model they have. Like with HD - it's a technology you have to see.
The other thing that I'd like to see with an RSS-enabled reader like this? Consuming the reports from a Blackbaud Infinity product such as Enterprise CRM so that a Director of Development can have to-the-second easy-to-view reports at all times.
(And if someone has done these - send me the picture and I'll post it! .... when I learn how to post pictures of course...)
WELL DONE Muscular Dystrophy Campaign!
http://www.muscular-dystrophy.org/ went live today with a new beautiful-looking site. Importantly, the site has been redesigned to help engage with and support those with MDC better, and I find it a really engaging site to navigate. Interaction with The Raiser's Edge is powered by donation and event forms powered by Blackbaud NetCommunity. We're really proud to have played a part, but I'd like to wish Sally, Eleanor, Abby and Colin at MDC a big congratulations for giving birth to this site!
(PS. Links not so slick today. Java not working right on my laptop, so can't press the button to make links embed with text. I'll clean-up when I next post!)
Hi. I'm Azadi Sheridan and I'm really excited to become a blogger! I've been at Blackbaud for almost five years now, and have used versions of The Raiser's Edge for almost a decade.
I'm going to write my blog (or rather I plan to write my blog) from a couple of points of view: I'm a former (and every now and then current as I love it) consultant and project manager for Blackbaud, which has provided me with the opportunity to meet hundreds of Raiser's Edge users (I'll post something about what we do in the future); I'm currently a managing consultant for Blackbaud Europe, which gets me involved in the dozens of projects my team are working on from training on The Raiser's Edge to consulting on Blackbaud NetCommunity to the myriad things we do for The Patron Edge, Blackbaud Direct Marketing, Blackbaud Text Messaging and some of other the new technologies we are rolling out. My third angle is as Chair of the Institute of Fundraising Technology Special Interest Group where I get to volunteer to help deliver talks, webinars and conferences on technology for the not for profit sector.
I particularly want to share some stories about not-for-profit software in the UK and mainland Europe to help tell you about the great innovations we are developing and implementing. I also want to be able to give an insight to working life at Blackbaud so you've a better idea of who we are.
So, expect some variety and the occasional random thing. I'm a non-techie at heart who loves the Not For Profit sector and I have a habit of a) getting excited about stuff I've seen with, for or from clients and b) getting excited about stuff that I've had to learn in order to keep up with the pace of change in IT and the Internet. I really hope to share that and to get some comments back on this site or by email.