Connections : Blackbaud NetCommunity

Blackbaud Nonprofit Central Helps Community Foundations

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:05:00 GMT

Blackbaud recently announced the availability of Blackbaud Nonprofit Central, a solution created specifically for community foundations that enables them to connect nonprofit organizations with donors of similar philanthropic interests. Blackbaud Nonprofit Central gives local nonprofits a central place to highlight their mission and gives donors the information they need to give wisely.

Community Foundation Focus
Blackbaud Nonprofit Central allows community foundations to connect donors with local nonprofits that meet the donors’ philanthropic interests. The solution contains information about all organizations in the United States that file a 990 return with the IRS. This gives local nonprofits a central place to better inform donors about their work, add additional profile information, and gives donors a very robust portal to help make giving decisions.

Partnering for Success
Communities Foundation of Texas used Blackbaud Nonprofit Central to create DonorBridge. They partnered with Blackbaud, the Center for Nonprofit Management in Dallas, the Institute for Urban Policy Research at The University of Texas at Dallas, and also received support from The Dallas Foundation. The site is focused on nonprofits in and around the Dallas area.

Big Launch and Big Results
DonorBridge was launched last week and on its first day received 8,400 donations to 353 organizations totaling over $4,000,000. That shattered previous single-day online giving records and sets a new standard among community foundations. That's a credit to the hard work and effort of CFT and the other organizations involved in this project.

APIs, Infinity, Integration, and Beyond
Behind the scenes, Blackbaud Nonprofit Central uses various technologies to make it all happen. Blackbaud is leveraging the Infinity Platform to deliver information about 500,000 nonprofit organzations. Fusion Labs, a Blackbaud Strategic Application Partner, leveraged Blackbaud's open APIs to develop key portions of the solution. Blackbaud NetCommunity drives the content management and email marketing tools. This gives community foundations a fully integrated total solution for their CRM, accounting, grants management, and online giving and communication needs.

This is a great new offering that is getting measureable and sizable results from day one. A big round of applause to everyone who was involved in this project and I'm really looking forward to seeing what's next.

Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow

Steve MacLaughlin — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:10:00 GMT

Not too long ago we launched a new offering of our popular Blackbaud NetCommunity solution for nonprofits. We took lots of the Internet goodness of BBNC and put it into an affordable prescriptive solution. Here are some more details about BBNC Grow...

What is it?
Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow is a solution for organizations that are ready to engage donors online, but may have a limited budget or resources to get started. BBNC Grow is a Software as a Service offering where all the costs are bundled into a single annual subscription price. And we gave it some valuable additions that you can't get anywhere else.

What do you get?

An Internet strategy assessment and assistance building an online communication and fundraising campaign plan

A complete content management system with a professional design that's ready for you to build on

An email communications platform with a themed newsletter, appeal, and acknowledgement that's ready to launch

Online giving pages with a personalized strategy to help you drive engaged traffic to them

A supporter profile update form allowing constituents to self-update records that can be approved in The Raiser’s Edge

An event registration page to help you attract more participation without more data entry

“Tell-a-Friend” links, calendars, email subscription forms, and other viral marketing tools to help your website community and online marketing list grow

Unmatched integration with The Raiser's Edge for donations, events, email, constituent information, and other vital information at no additional cost

Regular wellness checks to review campaigns, web content, online fundraising, and other areas to help ensure your long-term success

Why does it matter?
The 2008 State of the Nonprofit Industry Survey says that even though 97% of organizations have a website, only about three quarters of them say they are doing email marketing, and only half send regularly scheduled email communications. While 49% of organizations say they expect online fundraising to make a more substantial contribution toward their revenue in the next year, only 16% have a staffer devoted to it. And to top it all off, The NonProfit Times reported last year that 44% of potential supporters check out an organization online before making a gift.

We didn’t want lack of staff or expertise or resources to keep organizations from succeeding is this incredibly important and high potential area. And we've put together a solution that addresses the core online needs of nonprofit to get started moving in the right direction. Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow can help organizations begin to market themselves professionally and effectively online, so supporters can focus on confidently supporting the mission rather than critiquing the window dressing. It also gives you a robust toolset that you can grow into over time as your momentum and success builds.

How do you learn more?
You can learn more by visiting: www.blackbaud.com/grow. Register for one of our BBNC Grow web seminars or ask us for more information. You can also visit Genesis Women's Shelter. This organization recently implemented BBNC Grow and they are already on their way to improving their online results.

eLearning Library for Blackbaud NetCommunity News

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This blog entry will be short, sweet, and hopefully good news.

All current Blackbaud NetCommunity clients now have access to the BBNC eLearning Library at no cost for 2009.

To view the Blackbaud NetCommunity eLearning Library, select Training from the Services menu, and then click Subscriber Login under eLearning Library for Blackbaud NetCommunity.

Send us feedback by emailing elearninglibrary [at] blackbaud.com or by clicking "Tell Us" at the bottom of the page. Enjoy!

News, Notes, and Connections

Steve MacLaughlin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:18:00 GMT

Here are a few Blackbaud related news, notes, blogs, and other connections:

Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator
Blackbaud CTO Shaun Sullivan cooked up a Windows simulator for the iPhone. Is this a glimpse at the future? Maybe. What I can tell you is that it is getting thousands of downloads since being posted just last week.

AFP’s Fundraising Effectiveness Project
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project is a simple way for nonprofits to compare their fundraising gain and loss ratios from year to year and compare against other similar organizations. Blackbaud has partnered with AFP to make it easy to participate in a Fundraising Effectiveness Project. In the "Plugins" section of The Raiser’s Edge, users will find the “Fundraising Effectiveness Project Plug-in," which will allow them to easily compile the required information for the survey and submit it electronically. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project Plug-in only takes a few minutes to fill out and run, and not only will it give nonprofits a better idea of their giving, but it will also help the entire nonprofit community by contributing data to the overall project.

CRM&CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and NetCommunity
Nonprofit Technology Consultant Michelle Murrain reviews the integration between RE and BBNC. She notes that "If you are an organization which has Raiser’s Edge, and is committed to keeping it, and you want to do sophisticated integration between it and a web front end, then NetCommunity is probably your best solution." Sounds good to me.

Blogs from Across the Pond
There are a few new blogs from our team members at Blackbaud Europe. The latest blogs are The Cutting Edge by BBE managing director Martin Jervis, The Translator by program manager Robert McAllen, and Azadipedia by managing consultant Azadi Sheridan. Give them a look.

Blackbaud Services Achieves Level 1 PCI Compliance
Blackbaud Services has achieved full Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance as a Level 1 Service Provider. Trustwave, the leading provider of on-demand data security and payment card industry compliance management solutions, performed the PCI DSS validation.

The Importance of Customer Feedback

Steve MacLaughlin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:05:00 GMT

At Blackbaud, our product teams focus on two important things: Improvement and Innovation. Improve the features and functionality already available to customers and innovate to bring brand new capabilities to our solutions.

I want to focus on how we improve our solutions and the important role that customer feedback plays. Blackbaud gets feedback from a variety of sources including our Customer Advisory Board, support calls, discussion boards, consulting teams, client meetings, and other internal and external suggestion sources.

As you might imagine, there can be a lot of different ideas and suggestions that come in over time. Blackbaud works with a very diverse set of nonprofits from areas such as healthcare, higher education, family and human services, arts and cultural, independent schools, animal welfare, environmental, and international, just to name a few. That means we get a lot more insight into needs and trends than other vendors in the market.

The key to making the most of customer feedback is looking for patterns and common challenges. You might look through several suggestions and notice a lot of feedback about communication preferences. If you looked at them one-by-one, then it might just look like some isolated situations. But once you pull them together you discover a pattern around the need to manage both online and offline communication preferences. Developing functionality that can use Solicit Codes from The Raiser's Edge not only helps provide a solution, but the native integration is already in place to make it work at no additional cost.

Connecting the dots between suggestions and other forms of feedback really helps drive more meaningful improvements. This also means that you can help provide solutions to both existing and new customers that are valuable. That's a win-win scenario.

As a kid, I learned that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listening to customers and understanding their needs is critical to building a successful business and solution. We continue to find better ways for customers to provide feedback and being responsive is one of the reasons why clients view us as more of a partner instead of just another vendor.

In a future blog post I'll take a look at how we work with customers to bring new and innovative solutions to the market.

2008 in Review

Steve MacLaughlin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:01:00 GMT

2008 seemed to fly by so quickly, but a lot of things happened along the way. I thought that I would pause for a moment and look back a bit before looking ahead to 2009.

Book Club Beginnings
The year started off with copies of People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities flying off the bookshelves. I took some of the concepts from my book chapter and used them in presentations throughout the year. It wasn't long before People to People Fundraising became the fastest selling book in the series published by Wiley. As the year closes out I'm working on a new book that you'll hear more about in 2009.

Have PowerPoint, Will Travel
In 2008, I did more than 20 presentations on three different continents. This included sessions at the AFP, NTEN, AMA, and AHP conferences. I also managed to speak at all five of Blackbaud's major conferences this year: The Team Approach User Forum in Boston, the Nonprofit Conference in Montréal, the Asia Pacific Customer Conference in Sydney, the Conference for Not-for-Profits in London, and the Nonprofit Conference in Charleston. Thanks to everyone that attended the sessions and I'm looking forward to some new gigs in the new year.

The Market Has Spoken
More than four years ago, when we first released Blackbaud NetCommunity, it would be fair to say that having an integrated online solution wasn't at the top of a nonprofit's needs list. At the time, getting the basics of email and donations was enough to get the ball rolling for many of these organizations. Today, having a truly integrated solution isn't optional. In 2008, Blackbaud saw a large number of nonprofits choose or move to BBNC because they now understand how important this has become to meeting their goals.

The Big Announcement
The biggest news of the nonprofit technology industry this year was Blackbaud's acquisition of Kintera. It has been great getting to know and working with the team in San Diego these past few months. I've also been able to meet a number of Sphere clients who are encouraged and excited about the where we are going together. This has also meant that Blackbaud now provides online solutions to more nonprofits than any other vendor in the market today. And we continue to invest more than anyone else in constantly improving our Internet solutions.

Social Media Jam Sessions
Last year, a few of us rogue agents did some playing around with social media tools. In 2008, a whole cadre of folks from Blackbaud started using social media to engage with our clients and the nonprofit community. From blogs to Twitter to YouTube to forums and lots more. But by far the most fun this year was doing The Baudcast. About every two weeks Chad Norman, Blackbaud's resident social media guru, would pull together some topics, some people, and then let things fly. It was a great way to talk with people from across the nonprofit world. Look for The Baudcast to get even bigger and better in 2009.

The Day Job
I travel a lot, I present a lot, and I write in between. But my actual day job over the past year has been heading up the product management team for our Internet solutions at Blackbaud. We've been very busy with a lot of improvements and updates this year. How do I make it look so easy? Simple — I work with some amazing and very talented people. I want to thank everyone for putting up with me this year and for bringing their "A" game every day. Despite all of the technology — you still need people to make the magic happen. I can't wait to see what they pull out of the hat next.

Onwards and Upwards
This was a very long year that went by very quickly. Some parts of the year seem like just a blur, and there were moments when a lot of hard work paid off. As happy as I am about what we accomplished in 2008, I'm even more excited about some of the things we have planned for 2009. I'm looking forward to working on the NTEN Board of Directors, getting a new book edited and off to the publisher, catching up with some clients and meeting new ones too, and continuing to improve our Internet solutions for the nonprofit industry. Let's see where things go...

Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.6 Release News

Steve MacLaughlin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

The end of the year is a very busy time for most nonprofits, and the Blackbaud NetCommunity development team has been very busy on one last product release for the year. BBNC v5.6 went into controlled release today and will have general availability in January 2009. I mentioned in a previous blog entry that this is the first release of BBNC that leverages an agile software development approach.

Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.6 continues to expand its feature set and deepens unmatched integration with The Raiser's Edge, our education administration solutions, and Blackbaud Enterprise CRM.

Here are just some of the changes you'll see in the release:

Ability to enter metadata descriptions and keywords at both the Template and Page level

Ability to copy Layouts and Stylesheets to quickly reuse or modify site designs

Ability to style menus using unordered lists and custom classes

Ability to put the Donation, Event Registration, and Payment parts into a "test" mode

Ability to print and export Survey part results

Ability to compare content performance for testing purposes

And there are some good tweaks and adjustments including:

Adding tooltips for every merge field in the product

Adding default text for several of the email types and helplets

Adding custom tabs within Wave Social Networking

Adding group photos and other user contributed photo improvements

BBNC v5.6 will be compatible with both Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Please note that the third quarter 2009 release of BBNC will require Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will no longer be supported. Blackbaud OnDemand customers will have this upgrade handled as part of their normal system maintenance.

There are also some new features in this release including a brand new Membership part for our Blackbaud Enterprise CRM customers. This functionality was developed from the ground up for our Infinity Platform, and there will be plenty more of that coming in 2009.

One of the other new features is something we're calling Content Comparison. It's unlike any feature being offered by anyone else serving the nonprofit market today. Content Comparison extends the concept of testing emails to being able to test the content on your website. This new feature allows you to setup, monitor, and manage how different pieces of randomly presented content perform on an area of your website. This includes the ability to track both click-throughs and conversions all within BBNC.

Let's say you're running a membership promotion and you would like to know which of four different content variations gets the most clicks or purchases. Content Comparison allows you to perform these tests on both anonymous and registered users. Now imagine testing ask amounts on a set of known annual fund donors to see which ones perform better. These are the kinds of innovative things that Blackbaud is bringing to its customers now and in future releases.

In 2009, we'll continue to bring improvements and innovations to our Internet solutions. Blackbaud continues to increase its focus on the Internet while some vendors are cutting or shifting their budgets to other priorities. Look for more exciting news next year!

Blackbaud’s 2008 Conference for Nonprofits - Day 3

Steve MacLaughlin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:30:00 GMT

We're off and running at day three of Blackbaud's 2008 Conference for Nonprofits in Charleston, South Carolina. You can get updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bbcon and see what others are tweeting by looking at #bbcon. Be sure to check out the conference blog too.

First thing this morning is the keynote address by Peter Thum, the founder of Ethos Water. The company gives $.05 for every bottle purchased toward humanitarian water programs in developing countries such as Honduras and Kenya. Ethos has raised more than $6 million that will help an estimated 420,000 people. By 2010, Ethos plans to give at least $10 million to nonprofits that fund safe-water projects.

Right after lunch I'm going to attend Chad Norman's session called "The World Wide Web Show — Turn Your Staff into Stars with the Real-Time Social Web." I understand that Danielle Brigida (Associate Operations Coordinator, National Wildlife Federation) will be a special co-presenter with Chad.

Later in the afternoon I'll be in the Blackbaud Internet Solutions VIP room talking to customers. The room was a very busy place yesterday and I'm looking forward to the chance to connect with people.

Then it's time for my "Deep Dive into Blackbaud NetCommunity" session where I'll be covering a lot of great things about BBNC. I also plan to show a couple of things we're working on for future releases.

(Updating Regularly)

Blackbaud Gets Agile

Steve MacLaughlin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:01:00 GMT

For the past several months Blackbaud has been shifting to an agile software development process across many of our product development teams, including Blackbaud NetCommunity. I thought I would blog a little bit about agile and convey how this benefits our clients and their use of our Internet solutions.

While there are many different flavors of agile, there are some core principles including using smaller cross-functional teams that self-organize themselves to produce iterative functionality in shorter timeframes. That's development jargon for fast moving teams of Internet ninjas that create great features in less time. Client interaction also improves as a part of agile because you're able to discuss and review their feedback in a more responsive way than ever before.

There are several reasons for this shift, but one major one has to do with the tremendous growth of the BBNC development team over the years. Blackbaud has made a major commitment to providing the best available Internet solutions in the nonprofit space. The substantial increase in the number of clients using our solutions and their overall satisfaction show that things are paying off. And we've put our money where our mouth is.

Blackbaud spends more on annual research & development for our Internet products alone than any other company serving nonprofits worldwide. Not to mention our other investments in developing CRM, financial management, school management, ticketing, analytics, direct marketing, and other solutions. Moving to agile allows us to drive innovation and improvements while still having the largest design, development, and quality assurance team ever assembled.

There are also benefits of agile to our clients beyond the changes to how our solutions are developed. Some of these advantages include the following:

More Frequent Releases
Agile enables us to make more frequent releases of BBNC to respond to the needs of the nonprofit market and our customers. The days of the six month or year-long release cycles are over. Beginning with the BBNC v5.6 release in December of 2008, you'll begin seeing more releases on an annual basis. Blackbaud can choose to release finished features sooner without waiting on things that might need some more baking time.

Less Feedback Delays
The reality with almost any product is that there is a certain amount of delay from release to adoption to usage to feedback. This feedback loop is critical to improving your solutions, and the longer the loop the more time it takes to respond. Even if you get it right the first time, there's always feedback that can make a feature that much better. Agile shortens the feedback loop both during the development process and the release cycle in very measurable ways.

More Feature Visibility
Agile provides a tremendous amount of insight and visibility into what improvements are made in our solutions. Blackbaud can communicate to clients more information on a more frequent basis about product improvements that reinforce all the progress we're making. For example, we know 98% of all new features and improvements in the upcoming release of BBNC well in advance. More transparency is always a good thing.

There are also a lot of other important benefits from a product design and development process that we get with the move to agile. Not to mention all the fun new terminology like scrums, burn downs, sprints, zombies, chickens, and pigs. In a future blog post I'll talk about how we take feedback and suggestions from various channels to help improve our solutions using agile.

Random Interactions and Connections

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:33:00 GMT

Today's blog entry is a random collection of worthwhile and useful links. Enjoy!

NTEN's Donor Management Software Survey
Cast your vote. Take the time. Speak your mind. NTEN is now doing a survey of Donor Management Software that I really hope you'll spend a couple of minutes to complete. The feedback benefits the entire nonprofit community. Past NTEN surveys about CMSs and CRMs are also useful sources of comparative information. Blackbaud scored very well in those surveys.

The Baudcast - Episode 15
This episode cover disaster fundraising, Beth Kanter's Gnomedex experiment, real-time social fundraising, people to people fundraising, non-numeric web analytics, social actions widget, Google Grants, and more. The panel discussion includes Chad Norman (Internet Marketing Manager), Allison Van Diest (Blackbaud Interactive Marketing Manager), Melissa Dodge (Public Relations and Media Coordinator), and myself.

Introducing the Blackbaud Payment Service
Have you heard of PCI DSS? Has your technology vendor? If you handle credit cards, either online or offline, then you need to understand what PCI DSS compliance means to you and your organization. Learn more at Blackbaud's PCI FAQ or blog. From October of 2008, any organization that requires a new merchant ID from the credit card companies must be PCI DSS compliant. In October of 2009, all organizations must be PCI DSS compliant to process credit cards.

Accessibility and Blackbaud NetCommunity
BBNC v5.5 had some significant and important improvements on the accessibility front. There's a new article on Blackbaud Labs that explains how to build an accessible UL-based menu and the sample code to do it. Keen observers will also notice that the website is running a prototype of article building functionality, including tagging, within BBNC.

Listening to the Nonprofit Tech Social Media Stream
Beth Kanter has posted a great list of links, listings, and listening posts for people to get in tune with the nonprofit tech space. So many nonprofits always ask me what to read / listen / follow and she's put together some very helpful resources here. This is a good place to start.

Social Networking Ideas and More

Steve MacLaughlin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The latest episode of The Baudcast covers a lot of topics and is well worth a listen. Episode 14 is nearly 40 minutes long and a lot of the discussion is around the value of social networking and how nonprofits can begin to leverage it.

The panel discussion includes Chad Norman (Internet Marketing Manager), Melanie Milonas (Public Relations Manager), Chris Clark (Software Engineer), and myself from Blackbaud. Also on the panel are Danielle Brigida (National Wildlife Federation) and Garrett Keating (United States Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation).

There's a great exchange between the panel about social networking and what is working, what makes the metrics move, and what might not yield results. A common trend is to see a small number of very active users. I think this reinforces the 90/9/1 Rule that I've talked about in some of my presentations about social media.

We also talk a little bit more about some of the new social networking functionality in Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.5. Chris Clark touches on some of the development work that has been done on the product, and he discusses some of the thought processes that went into building this functionality.

The build vs. borrow choice also gets a fair amount of discussion by the panel. Many nonprofits might be able to get things started purely through borrowed technologies or social networks. For certain key constituent groups the build approach may be a very effective tool to help increase the relevancy of those relationships.

A question sent in via Twitter from Marc Pitman asked about fundraising differences and trends in Asia Pacific. I did my best to explain the hybrid nature of fundraising here that combines a focus on recurring gifts and major gift development. It's very much a combination of fundraising techniques used in the UK, Europe, and North America.

There's plenty of other good stuff in Episode 14, and I hope you'll listen to it and send us some feedback. I was also glad that Skype managed to work and sound pretty good from here in Australia. Sometimes all this technology actually does work.

Blackbaud's 2008 Asia Pacific Customer Conference - Day 2

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:30:00 GMT

It's the second and final day of Blackbaud's 2008 Asia Pacific Customer Conference in Sydney, Australia. Yesterday had some really good presentations, and some even better in-between session conversations.

I'm doing four presentations today and I'm hoping that my voice holds up. Here's what I'll be speaking about:

Integrating Online and Offline Channels to Get Results
You've Got Email! Now What?
Blackbaud NetCommunity Demystified
Social Networking & Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.5

Hopefully I'll be able to blog about some of the other sessions, but it's going to be a very busy day around here.

(Updating Periodically)

Connections from Down Under

Steve MacLaughlin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:08:00 GMT

I'm in Australia for the next few days to present at Blackbaud's 2008 Asia Pacific Customer Conference. Our office here in Sydney has grown tremendously over the past few years. And Blackbaud's Internet offerings continue help how nonprofits in the region engage with their constituents.

Australia is a country of about 21 million people and there are 170,000 nonprofit organizations registered with the government. Aussie's donate about $11.4 billion per year to charities, of which $7.7 billion comes from individuals. And the whole Asia-Pacific region continues to grow as well.

Organizations like Make-A-Wish Australia, Wildlife Warriors, Save the Children Australia, and Habitat for Humanity Australia have chosen Blackbaud NetCommunity to help drive their online fundraising and community building initiatives. The ability to handle a nonprofit's content management, email campaigns, online fundraising, community building, and integrated data needs has made it a very popular solution.

But you don't have to be a very large or international nonprofit to take advantage of what BBNC has to offer. My favorite client story from the trip so far is Lort Smith Animal Hospital in North Melbourne. The organization is doing their first ever online fundraising event called Strays Birthday. The group hopes to raise $200,000 in both online and offline donations as part of the event.

The Blackbaud Interactive team here in Sydney did a tremendous job working with the client to develop an event fundraising website with some character. The microsite has a good mix of form and function. Understanding your audience and being able to have a bit of fun with the design is always a welcome sight.

In just a few short weeks, the Lort Smith Animal Hospital has raised over $20,000 online. They are also raising money through offline channels and have the ability to quickly measure and track the progress of their efforts in The Raiser's Edge. For them, having an integrated solution for their fundraising endeavors is already paying off.

I'll be blogging later this week from the Asia Pacific Customer Conference. I'm really looking forward to meeting with and talking to the nonprofits that will be attending.

Multichannel Marketing Mojo

Steve MacLaughlin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:20:00 GMT

There is a lot of talk and discussion about multichannel communication out there in the nonprofit world. Organizations want to do it, consultants recommend ways of doing it, and technology vendors claim to have the tools to actually get the job done. But in many cases, it's more sizzle than steak.

At Blackbaud, we've been working on delivering a true multichannel tool that allows nonprofits to do the complete lifecycle: Data Segmentation, Channel Selection, Message Creation and Delivery, and Roll-up Reporting. While some tools on the market handle bits and pieces of this process, there aren't any that embrace both online and offline channels. Until now.

Our Blackbaud Direct Marketing (BBDM) application will soon include functionality that integrates with Blackbaud NetCommunity's email capabilities. It's a great example of the Infinity platform in action that pulls multiple products together as a single robust solution.

BBDM has a very strong set of marketing planning, scheduling, segmenting, and reporting features that clients are using. With a solid foundation in place we've added new channels that can be leveraged as part of a direct marketing campaign. And we're surfacing BBNC's email tools on the Infinity platform to do it.

This is a big step in the right direction for nonprofits that want a solution that does more than just talk about multichannel capabilities. Gone are the days when you have to do your direct mail in one application, your email in another, and other passive channels somewhere else. (Nothing legacy about what Blackbaud is doing here.)

Blackbaud Direct Marketing allows users to make segmentations made up of highly granular data selections from any data source, including but not limited to The Raiser's Edge, Blackbaud Enterprise CRM, or BBNC. Then you have the option to create mailing packages that may be a direct mail piece and/or an email. If you choose email as one of the options, then you can setup the various email settings and design options without having to switch to a different application. Sending test messages or final blasts can also all be done within BBDM.

From there the integrated reporting and tracking capabilities of BBDM and BBNC kick-in. No spreadsheets or disparate system for tracking source codes. Nope, we have the tracking and finder number goodness baked right into the mailings. And conversion information can be round tripped back to the CRM. (I won't confirm or deny the rumor that grown men have openly wept upon seeing this.)

Look for this capability to get even more powerful over time. Adding additional active and passive marketing channels will allow for a more comprehensive approach to marketing and fundraising efforts. Two thumbs up to the development teams and customers that helped shape this unique solution.

Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.5 Release News (Part 4)

Steve MacLaughlin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.5 was released last week and the initial feedback and response has been really positive. Here are a couple additional items of note about the product.

First, there's now a Blackbaud NetCommunity blog called The Connector that launched today. This product blog joins its other brothers and sisters like The User's Edge, The Spotlight, and The Thread. Look for contributors from across product development, Blackbaud Interactive, and other parts of the company to post things on this blog.

We've also posted some more information about our new Wave Social Networking functionality that is part of Blackbaud NetCommunity v5.5. Check out some of the videos and additional feature information that has been posted online.

Over on The Doc Side blog, Betsy Unger has posted some updates about the new BBNC User Guides. There are also some new user guides that include the Website Design Guide, Team Fundraising Guide, and the User Networking Guide.

And another post talks about the new video tutorials that are being added to BBNC. The first tutorial is a great step-by-step guide to processing sign-up transactions in The Raiser's Edge. This tutorials will appear along with the BBNC help files that are built-in to the product.

Look for some other product news and notes in the future.