Professional Services Conference
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.