Three Questions About Virtualizing Patron Edge

I've been on upgrade planning calls with about a dozen organizations in the last few weeks, and several have asked about putting Patron Edge in a virtual environment. Three questions have come up repeatedly and I want to address them and give some food for thought when planning your next server hardware purchase.

Will it work? - The Patron Edge Quality Assurance team and several members of our Support team use VMWare to test multiple versions of PE at once, and it works perfectly. Keep in mind this is for the server side of things. While a virtualization solution will do fine on workstations as far as the program is concerned, I can't guarantee that your printers/scanners/card swipes will work flawlessly.

Is it slow? - In-house, I haven't seen a performance difference between a physical server and a virtual server with the same system specs. Several organizations currently use VirtualBox or VMWare because they can buy extremely fast servers and then split resources over several virtual machines. The bottleneck of a virtual machine setup is the hard disk, so be sure to read up on best practices to keep your virtual machines running as fast as possible.

Is it supported? - Server-side, it's absolutely supported as long as the virtual machine meets our system requirements. Currently, at least one organization has a fully-loaded server with a fast Linux distribution installed. They put Patron Edge and their other enterprise programs on virtual servers.

Supportability is only an issue is on the workstation side, and that is because we don't test peripherals on virtual machines. I have seen a Macbook, with a Datamax printer connected, running Patron Edge through VMWare Fusion and printing tickets without any issues. But if the printer didn't work in that setup, my Support team wouldn't be able to assist since we don't have that kind of computer hardware and it wasn't verified as working by the Quality Assurance team.

What other questions do you have about putting your Blackbaud products in a virtual environment? Have you been doing it for a while at your own organization? Leave a note for others in the comments.

Two Cool Tools for the Back Office

I'm about six months into my own nonprofit arts organization (parkcirclefilms.org) and am always looking for ways to work smarter and automate repetitive tasks. I wanted to share two excellent tools I've implemented to manage the administrative stuff so I can focus on our mission.

TWiki

TWiki is a really cool, open source wiki and collaboration system. It can be a bear to install, but the wiki engine is powerful and it sports awesome features like:

Project management and project development - Your IT staff can use it for coordinating on website or report development, and the marketing folks can use it to collaborate on your next big campaign.

Knowledge management - As my organization grows, more volunteers have started getting involved. To keep the learning curve low, volunteers are given a login to TWiki that gives them access to our Policies and Procedures web and other pertinent information. Things they shouldn't be allowed to read are kept private via group security.

Document management - This was what caught my eye first. We have meeting minutes, image files and other documents that I need to share easily and securely. Google Docs was my first attempt, but it lacks version control and you can only do text documents and spreadsheets. TWiki is good for keeping track of documents, and keeping them organized in a way that makes sense (because the file name "mrkt_sum_09_letter_stats.xls" won't make any sense in two months).

Wordpress

Wordpress is the best blogging platform currently available. It's free and open source, and has hundreds of great plugins to extend it. We didn't need a full content management system, so this was a way to build a decent-looking web presence in just a couple of days. Creating and editing content is simple, so if I'm unavailable and we need a piece of information added to the website, I've got four non-techy people who can do it without breaking a sweat. I'm even testing out an event calendar plugin to let people more easily see our upcoming film schedule.

If you're not using Patron Edge Online for your web presence or to sell tickets, I highly recommend checking out Wordpress, or even Drupal if you need a full-featured content management system without paying full-time web developers to build and maintain a custom website.

What tools do you use at your organization to automate back office tasks or keep things flowing smoothly on the administrative side? Share your experience in the comments.

Best Practices for Nonprofit Websites

Smashing Magazine is a great resource for print and web design and consistently puts out great content. They recently had an article about best practices for nonprofit websites that I wanted to share. As the article puts it:

A non profit’s website needs to make it easy to find out more about their cause, to donate money, and to become more involved. It needs to make it easy for media contacts to find the information they need and the contact information of key personnel. And it needs to do all this in a way that’s inviting to the organization’s targeted donors and/or volunteers.

Read the full article to see examples of how to make your content the center of your website, increase volunteers and donors and keep people coming back often. If you'd like to show off your own website, leave a link in the comments for others to see.

The 20-Minute Test Environment, Part II

Last week you set up a Patron Edge test environment, and now you're ready to get going with the web side of things. Here is how to get your Patron Edge Online test environment up and running in 20 minutes.

Restore some data
We're switching this up a bit from last time, since PEO doesn't use the Blackbaud Management Console. Through SQL Management Studio, create a backup of your live PEO database and restore it on your test machine. For the sake of speed, run the DB Cleaner function before backing up.

Install Patron Edge Online
Run the PEO installer, choosing all three components when asked what to install (website files, PE communication components, and PEO communication components). There are a couple of places where it will ask you to make a connection to your PEO and PE databases. For simplicity, choose SQL Authentication on these screens and use the 'sa' account. You'll be able to pick your PE and PEO databases from a list. On any screen that asks for an IP address, use 127.0.0.1, and leave all of the ports at their defaults. Don't check any boxes on screens where it talks about internal/external IP stuff, just click Next to fly right through those.

Copy custom files and images
There are many ways to get your stuff across, but for the sake of getting this thing running in 20 minutes, here's what to do:

• Grab a copy of your live PEOSite folder and move it to the desktop of the test machine.
• Open the folder and delete the file called global.asa.
• Drag the folder into C:\Program Files\Blackbaud\The Patron Edge Online and click Yes to All when prompted.

If you have any customizations that use DLLs, you'll need to copy those over as well and register them. This differs from site to site, so you'll just have to know what any custom DLLs are named and where they are located.

And that's PEO in 20 minutes! Are you experiencing any problems while setting up your test system, or did I cover it pretty well? Leave a note in the comments.

The 20-Minute Test Environment, Part I

Things have been quiet on the blogging front for the last couple of weeks; I've been playing with some cool technologies like the CodeIgniter framework for creating web applications and the jQuery library (with these awesome video tutorials) for doing fun web stuff without having to learn a ton of JavaScript.

In light of my recent attempts at developing cool features and tools, I'm throwing out some instructions to help you build your own test environment. Being a tech support guy, I am a big fan of having separate machines for production and testing. It can be really cumbersome to try to put both the test and production systems on the same machine. In some cases there is even potential to break the live system by putting a test system right beside it. With that in mind, here is the 20-minute, four-step version of creating a test box. Use it for everything from developing your own custom reports, to testing new coupon schemes, to performing a big batch of merges.

Find a machine
You need a machine first, but it doesn't have to be a real one. The cheapest solution (under $150) is to download the free and excellent VMWare Server. Install Windows XP Professional and SQL 2005 Developer Edition, both with the latest service packs. SQL Dev Edition is only $49 and you can find XP Pro online for under $100.

Install Patron Edge
Since everything is going on one machine, just run the Patron Edge installer on the test machine and hit Next, Next, Finish. Leave everything at the default setting.

Restore some data
Grab last night's backup of your Patron Edge database and restore it onto the test box. Knowledgebase is your friend on this one if you're not very familiar with making and restoring from backups.

Set up credit cards

• Take a copy of payment.ini from the live system and put it in C:\Program Files\The Patron Edge on the test box.
• While you're in there, find Tix_PSC and do Send to Desktop to make a shortcut.
• Install PCCharge (again, it's just a Next, Next, Finish deal).
• Edit your PCCharge shortcut and add the /DEMO switch in the Target field. This puts it in demo mode so that cards aren't really charged
• Edit your Tix_PSC shortcut and add the /a /online /force switches.

What does your test environment look like? Share your best practices in the comments.

Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part III

This is the final part of my three part series on integration between Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge. In this part, I'm going to go over one of the things that all organizations battle with, regardless of the CRM application used - duplicate records .

Once your database has been around for a while, duplicates start to become a frequent concern. There are two ways to deal with duplicates: preventing them and merging them.

Prevention - The best way to deal with dupes is to keep them from ever getting into the system. It takes more effort upfront but pays off in the long run with less ongoing data cleanup. Prevention requires a two-pronged approach using the features of the software and changes to your business rules.

Merging - Some dupes still slipped through, now what? In an integrated system, we use a special merge function that hopefully makes this easy for you. It does remove the move tab features of Raiser's Edge and forces you to only keep one record; we chose to do this in order to keep the data properly synched. The positive side of this rule though is that you can merge in batches. Set your duplication criteria in Raiser's Edge and run the merge from Administration, and you can merge lots of dupes at the same time instead of going one by one.

And that's the final installment of PE/RE best practices. If you got something out of it, leave a comment to let me know and I'll do more of these in the future.

Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part II

 This is the second part of my three part series on integration between Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge. Today, let's look at some common issues and best practices with the integration of memberships.

Membership gift information: In Patron Edge, a membership is seen as something of monetary value that can include benefits for the cardholder. In The Raiser's Edge, a membership is frequently seen as a giving club or form of recognition. Because of this difference, Patron Edge does not assume that a membership should have a gift associated with it. If your organization requires a gift for memberships in The Raiser's Edge, you can set the system up to automatically create gifts when a membership is added.

Membership expiration: Since memberships in The Raiser's Edge are pretty much a giving club with a little bit of reminder functionality, it's not really important to a lot of development offices if two membership periods overlap. In Patron Edge, this is a big no-no because of the benefits that can be associated with memberships. If Bob Hernandez has a membership that doesn't expire until June and he does an early renewal in April, make sure that the start date for the new membership is for the day after the current membership ends. Otherwise Bob, who normally comes to the zoo once a week with two free tickets as a member benefit, now gets four free tickets since he technically has two active memberships. If you enter memberships in PE, it will start the new one automatically after the current one. In RE, there's a rule in Configuration, Business Rules that will set new memberships to automatically start at the end of the current period; turn this on to save time and headache!

What practices are you following to ensure a successful membership integration? Leave a note in the comments.

Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part I

I've gotten some requests to write more about integration between Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge, so today I'm starting a three-part series on ways to get the most out of your integration while minimizing the amount of cleanup and management needed. Let's start with some ideas for handling constituent/CRM records.

Code tables: Ensure your code tables in The Raiser's Edge are spotless before integrating with Patron Edge. The ones to pay most attention to are Address Types, States, Solicit Codes, Titles and Suffixes. PE is great at ticketing, but doesn't have some of the advanced CRM features of RE (like global change), so you'll want to take care of this ahead of time.

Addresses: The Raiser's Edge allows a constituent to have multiple addresses of the same type, while Patron Edge enforces a rule that only one address is allowed per Address Type. For example, make sure your constituents in RE don't have more than one Home address; only the first one on the record will sync with Patron Edge.

Phones: The same thing goes here as with Address Types, but with more flexibility. The Raiser's Edge makes phone types a child of addresses, while Patron Edge makes it a child of the main CRM record. The Integration Control program lets you choose which RE address type to sync phone numbers with, but think about the implications of this. If you have a Home address in RE and you choose to sync Mobile phone with Home, keep in mind that if Mobile is also a phone type on the Work address in RE with a different phone number, it does not sync. In this case, consider being specific with your phone types, like Personal Mobile and Work Mobile, so that you can sync both and have them live on the desired address.

Deceased flag: Patron Edge doesn't have the concept of 'deceased', so if this information is important to your box office/guest services folks, consider globally adding it in The Raiser's Edge as a constituent code. Globally adding and deleting things in RE is so easy and you can base it on a query. Using it as a constituent code/client type allows you to mark people deceased in both directions as well, because you can use the Query module in RE to round up folks with that constituent code and then globally mark them deceased. Now you can take full advantage in RE of the Deceased features in Mail, Reports and Export.

What is your process for dealing with addresses or deceased clients? Share your tips in the comments.

The Value of a Ticket

This is a guest post by Michael Culler. Michael is the Managing Consultant for Blackbaud's Arts and Cultural consulting practice.

Given the current economy, overall decline in attendance and the competitive landscape for patrons and supporters of arts organizations, every organization must consider diversification in brand awareness, funding and underwriting – even around what is printed on tickets or done with a ripped ticket.

From corporate messaging on tickets where the sponsor gains passive access to potential consumers, to cross-marketing with “like-minded” organizations, the relationship with the patron or supporter has an opportunity to deepen. By building an intrinsic value into the ticket, you benefit as patrons take more than a “one and done” attitude towards their relationship with you.

With corporate sponsorship via a physical ticket, it's a win for both parties; the corporation gains access to a new customer base through brand awareness, and still has an opportunity to demonstrate its softer, more philanthropic side. You benefit by lowering the overall cost of the show, but more importantly you have an opportunity to maintain a level of affordability for the patron or guest by keeping ticket costs lower.

One way to build intrinsic value into a ticket is to offer the patron a discount on a future transaction, such as a subscription or a single ticket sale. Additionally the ticket number could be used as a promotional code to be used online, or as part of a larger raffle at the end of show run or season.

The relationship via the ticket could extend to certain conveniences or future benefits outside of your organization. It could serve as a discount for parking at the next show, for dinner at a local restaurant or as part of a larger discount cross-marketing plan between you and another organization.

Cultural organizations should consider building a culture with their patrons that makes it bad form to throw out a ticket.

Sweet New Features for Patron Edge

If your organization is running Patron Edge 3.340, patch 2 is now available for download at http://downloads.blackbaud.com. It includes fixes for the following reported issues:

BB575312 - Error: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Cannot open database
BB584847 - Error: Assertion Failed: unhandled control type - need to add to multiselectcontrolhandler BBBox1
BB581378 - Mastercard recorded as AMEX when a sale is made in Kiosk

That's the boring stuff, now for the really awesome features:

Debit cards - Now you can process debit cards through Patron Edge! Accepting debit cards is a great way to increase your ROI and use the money that you're not paying in fees to further your mission. Consider this scenario:

In a week, you perform 250 in-house transactions totalling $30,000. If you run all of those as credit cards at a 3% fee per transaction, you pay $900 in fees. If you run all of those as online debit cards (meaning you're capturing a PIN) at about $0.60 per transaction, you pay $150 in fees. Repeat for three more weeks, and you've saved yourself $3,000. Obviously not all of your in-house sales will switch from credit to debit, and fees vary based on your merchant services provider, but just looking at ballpark figures you can save yourself thousands a year.

Gift Cards - We have added support into Patron Edge for prepaid, reloadable gift cards. You can now sell your own personal-branded gift cards for patrons to give to their friends and family! Our current partner for this is Valutec .

Gift Certificate/Voucher Report - I wrote about this spiffy new report we've added into the Reports Wizard in this post a couple weeks ago, along with a screencast. It's solid, flexible, and can likely solve any of your reporting needs around vouchers without having to write your own custom reports.

All of these features are included standard in Patron Edge, no additional modules to purchase. To add debit and gift cards, you will want to speak with your merchant services provider to find out what information needs to be added into PCCharge.

Make sure you have a patch plan and can handle the downtime it takes to apply a patch, and don't forget to see Knowledgebase solution BB346664 to make sure any products you integrate with are compatible. If you haven't updated to Patron Edge 3.340 yet, call up your account rep and tell them that you're ready to get these new features!

Customizing the behavior of links in Patron Edge Online

I was working through some advanced Patron Edge Online questions this week and was asked if there are any special parameters that you can add when loading a page to make it behave a certain way. To make life easy I've put together a comprehensive list that shows what parameters can be added, what they mean, and what pages can make use of them. Happy hacking!

Global options that can be used with any link
Interface - the interface code
SalePoint - the sales point code; only needed when using the sales point filter
language - the language code of all text on the site
Charset - the character set to use for all text
CSS_FILE - only used when overriding the CSS file of the desired interface
DIR - text direction of the site, to handle right-to-left languages

LTR - left to right (default)
RTL - right to left

Example: http://mysite.org/default.asp?Interface=3&SalePoint=102

show.asp/show_1.asp
shCode - the show code to load, from the PEO Administration Site

show_events_list.asp
shCode - the show code to load, from the PEO Administration Site

default.asp/shows_list_1.asp
cgName - category name
cgCode - category code
use_more - whether to only show recommended shows in the category, or all shows of that category

all_events_1.asp
startDate - the start date for the view
direction - number of days/weeks/months before or after the start date parameter. Date unit is determined based on the viewCode
viewCode - how shows are displayed

0 = Day (default)
1 = Week
2 = Month
3 = Calendar

Example: To display a calendar view of all events in June, use http://mysite.org/all_events.asp?viewcode=3&startdate=2009-6-1

hall.asp
event - code of the event to load, from the PEO Administration Site

donation.asp/donation_1.asp
code - the fund code of the donation to load, from the PEO Administration Site

membership.asp/membership_1.asp
membership_code - the code of the membership category to load, from the PEO Administration Site

prepaid_subscription.asp/prepaid_subscription_1.asp
prepaid_code - the series code to load, from the PEO Administration Site

merchandise.asp/merchandise_1.asp
code - the fund code of the merchandise item to load, from the PEO Administration Site
count - number of items to load by default

Example: You want an easy process to put two programs (merchandise item 24) in the basket when buying a certain show, so you use http://mysite.org/merchandise.asp?code=24&count=2

Patch 11 for Patron Edge 3.310 has been released

Patch 11 for Patron Edge 3.310 is now available for download at http://downloads.blackbaud.com. This patch adds compatibility with the upcoming release of The Raiser's Edge 7.9.

Make sure you have a patch plan and can handle the downtime it takes to apply a patch, and don't forget to see Knowledgebase solution BB346664 to make sure any products you integrate with are compatible.

Feature Preview: Gift Certificate/Voucher Report

So I'm always talking about using multimedia to engage your audience online, whether it is telling your story through pictures, audio or video. I decided to walk the talk a little bit and created this brief screencast to give you an idea of what to expect in the next couple of weeks when the next patch drops for Patron Edge 3.34. Our big new features are reloadable gift cards (using Valutec as the processor), debit cards, and a new report called the Gift Certificate/Voucher Report. I'm new to screencasting and couldn't find a microphone while making this, so it's a little awkward as I try to show off the new report using only the screen. Let me know what you think and I can definitely do more of these in the future.

Click here to see the Voucher Report. I'm still experimenting and Youtube made the video too grainy, so use this direct link to view it full size until I find out what I'm doing wrong.

If you haven't talked to your account rep yet to plan your upgrade to 3.34, I recommend doing so to take advantage of all the new features in both PE and PEO. System requirements for these new versions have changed significantly though, so be sure to check out the latest requirements here.

Patron Edge 3.310 patch 10 is now available

Happy integration patch day! Patch 10 for Patron Edge 3.310 is now available for download at http://downloads.blackbaud.com and includes fixes for the following reported issues:

BB350540 - Error synchronizing membership for : Field is read only: Type
BB353804 - Memberships do not sync properly for specific records
BB403754 - Error synchronizing membership for : Expires on required if not a Lifetime Membership
BB417248 - Error: Error synchronizing membership for [XXXXX] Membership type [XX] is inactive in the Patron Edge
BB437126 - Spousal relationships do not sync properly
BB461306 - PE email addresses not synchronizing into RE
BB469214 - Error: 'Error merging from PE: Merges are not allowed outside of the Blackbaud merge application'
BB516866 - Incorrect number of transactions appear on Ticket Sales Commissions report detailed by event

Make sure you have a patch plan and can handle the downtime it takes to apply a patch, and don't forget to see Knowledgebase solution BB346664 to make sure any products you integrate with are compatible.

Biscuits and Blogging

I subscribe to the Ticket Biscuit blog, and they recently did a great series called Selling Tickets in a Tough Economy. While their audience is primarily made up of promoters of pop music, boxing and mixed martial arts, their content frequently applies to nonprofit venues as well.

The first article in the series is about using tech to work for you, to spread your reach and connect better with your audience. Josh Gair of Impact Entertainment Services in Orlando uses Twitter and other free, online tools to spread the word about new events and encourages his network of friends to then push it to their friends. From the article:

Gair is a poster representative of a movement that is rapidly gaining steam amongst live event promoters – acknowledging the importance of internet-based networking tools and using them to find audiences. Gair argues that it’s pretty much a necessity in today’s game. “I think that those who aren’t leveraging these tools are just too busy doing the business to slow down and realize the potential,” he states.

Gair also expressed the importance of constantly putting out fresh content to keep people involved and excited, and I couldn't agree more. Just sending an email announcement and running some advertising isn't enough nowadays. While those are great tools to let people know, they are not ways to make people care. Use a blog or weekly newsletter to keep the content coming. Write stuff that people want to read about. Here are just a few ideas:

• Get buy-in from your creative director and stage manager to post "behind the scenes" articles or clips of rehearsal videos.
• Have a curator write about interesting or new pieces in your museum's collection.
• Post weekly interviews with musicians in the orchestra, including the current top 10 songs in their music players.

Write often and be consistent. Use a best-of-breed blog tool with a low learning curve like Wordpress or Movable Type. Like all great tools, these stay out of your way and let you do your thing rather than becoming another system to learn. I highly recommend Wordpress and use it for my own nonprofit. It's free and open source, and you can download and install it yourself or use their free hosted blog service (with your own domain name!).

What tech tools are used at your organization to keep your audience engaged and increase your reach to new people? Leave a success (or disaster) story in the comments.