Navigating the Not-for-Profit Market

The Raiser's Edge & FirstClass Integration

Emily Cunningham — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:17:00 GMT

Many times in talking to clients and prospects we hear, 'Does The Raiser's Edge integrate to FirstClass?'. Even when organisations are consolidating all of their systems into one central CRM, they keep FirstClass in place. We've even heard, 'Over my dead body you are taking away FirstClass!' (OK, a little legacy humour there).

In response to the market, Blackbaud has entered into a partnership with Clearwater Consultancy Ltd., makers of the leading legacy management software, FirstClass. FirstClass enables legacy staff to keep track of all bequests made to their organisation. They can record all the important details about each legator and bequest together with estimated values, income received to date, review dates and a complete contact history. The partnership entails an integration between The Raiser's Edge and FirstClass.

The integration allows users to:

Search for existing records in RE7 before creating a case
Add new records in RE7 from within FirstClass
Pull constituent data from RE7 into a case record in FirstClass
Implement appropriate business processes such as marking Legator records as deceased in RE7 before adding to FirstClass

Key benefits of this solution are:

Prevent duplicate records between systems by linking constituents (RE7) and cases (FirstClass) appropriately
Better, cleaner data between systems - ensuring that records are marked as deceased and ‘do not contact', etc.
Less administrative burden to maintain data between systems
Gain a better understanding of where legacy gifts come from (having a view of whether or not the constituent had a relationship with the organisation previously)

If you are interested in learning more, just let me know.

PCI Compliance: Do you have a plan?

Emily Cunningham — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:36:00 GMT

PCI Compliance seems to be getting a lot more attention lately. I hear about it at industry events. I see it in publications. And while I'm glad that there is discussion, I'm afraid that I'm not seeing a whole lot of action. When I speak to people in the not-for-profit market, it is a rare occasion that I come across an organisation that has a plan for achieving PCI Compliance. Does your organisation have a plan?

What is PCI Compliance? There are two key worldwide compliance requirements:

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements developed by the major credit card companies to enhance credit card data security. All organisations that process, store, or transmit payment card data must be PCI DSS compliant or risk losing their ability to process credit card payments.
Payment Application Security Standards (PA-DSS) is the PCI Security Standards Council-managed program to help software vendors and others develop secure payment applications that do not store prohibited data.

So that means that it is the responsibility of each organisation to comply with PCI DSS - you should review the standards provided by the security council and assess your PCI requirements. The Security Standards Council provides a Quick Reference Guide and a Self-Assesment that you can download from their website which could be starting point for your plan.

What is Blackbaud's Plan? In order to make The Raiser's Edge, NetSolutions, Blackbaud NetCommunity, and Blackbaud Enterprise CRM compliant with PCI DSS and PA DSS, we have developed the Blackbaud Payment Service (BBPS). BBPS integrates with the PA DSS compliant versions of our software and stores credit card and merchant account information in a secure environment. Credit card numbers will no longer be visible in our software and will be replaced with reference tokens. When you process credit card transactions, the reference token in your database will summon the stored credit card number from BBPS to be used in the transaction (so you will be able to process recurring transactions). The BBPS has successfully completed our PCI DSS audit.

For more information on PCI, check out our PCI Compliance Resources such as our PCI blog, PCI video and FAQs. I'd love to hear from you if you do have a plan.

Don't need to own a car? Join the club.

Emily Cunningham — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:57:00 GMT

Have you seen this streetcar advert on the tube recently?

It's a great analogy for Software as a Service (SaaS). For those of you that might not be familiar with SaaS - here's the Wikipedia definition:

Software as a service (SaaS) is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer's burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.

Back to the streetcar analogy - with streetcar, I'm just using the car as a service. So all of the hassle and cost (insurance, road tax, maintenance, etc.) that is associated with owning and maintaining a car goes away. In the software world, this is all of the hassle and cost of owning and maintaining the actual software (hardware, IT resources, upgrades, downtime, etc.).

SaaS has lots of potential in the not-for-profit sector. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concept - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Infinity developments

Emily Cunningham — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:00:00 GMT

One of the key tenets of the Infinity platform is the ability to create an open 3rd party developer ecosystem. A network where ideas and applications can be freely exchanged and shared. Sounds exciting doesn't it?

Hang on, what's the Infinity platform? Well, first and foremost let me clarify that Infinity is a platform; it is not a product. Products are built on the platform and the platform is what provides the underlying architecture / technology for the products. All future Blackbaud products are being built on the Infinity platform. Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (BBEC) and Blackbaud Direct Marketing are products that are built on the Infinity platform.

Now back to the developer ecosystem excitement. Just a few weeks ago, David Zeidman of Zeidman Development released the first 3rd party developed customisation on the Infinity platform. The customisation Google Calendar Integration for Blackbaud Enterprise CRM (BBEC) allows users to save an event in BBEC and for it to appear on the organisation's Google calendar. He also wrote the same customisation for The Raiser's Edge 7. Check out his blog with a screen cast of the customisation.

Shaun Sullivan, Blackbaud's Chief Technology Officer, posted an article about it on Blackbaud Labs (which is a site that our Product Development department uses to post content, applications, technology, sample code, and other stuff to get feedback on). Shaun provides a more thorough, technical explanation than what I've got here so have a look at his post as well.

I look forward to more exciting developments!

A new blogger...

Emily Cunningham — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:49:00 GMT

Hi! I'm Emily Cunningham and I work at Blackbaud Europe as the UK Market Product Manager. What does that actually mean you might ask? Don't worry - I get that a lot. The answer isn't easy though. It means lots of different things but essentially I am responsible for uncovering the wants and needs of the UK not-for-profit market and then developing our solutions to align with those wants and needs. So that can mean anything from evaluating current usage of products in market today such as The Raiser's Edge, to taking new products to market such as Blackbaud Direct Marketing. It can mean conducting market research, working on partnerships, managing our Client Advisory Board, etc.

But ultimately it means doing a lot of listening - to customers, to prospects, to consultants, to the market.

That said, I think blogging can sometimes be a one-way conversation - with the blogger pushing information out. But I'd like to think that this blog is a dialogue. So I'll try to keep my posts relevant and concise and I hope that you will try to not only read them but comment on them. Let me know what you are thinking!

And since the nature of my position covers a little bit of everything - that's what you can expect on my blog as well. There might be posts about our products, posts about market trends, posts about Blackbaud news, etc. It is all open game.

Looking forward to hearing from you on future posts!