The Spotlight : Administration

Manage Your Users' Access to Help Resources

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:45:00 GMT

This post isn't specifically about Patron Edge, but it is a question that comes up on a weekly basis. The site administrator at your organization has the abiliy to add or remove access to the Blackbaud Support website. It's both easy and quick to do; here's the short version:

Click your name at the top right of any Blackbaud web page.
In the left nav bar under Organization Information, click Invite New User.
Enter the user's first name, last name, and email address.
Mark the new user's main role and click Submit to send an Invite Email to the user.
The user receives an invitation email, and you receive a copy for your records.
- If he doesn't have a Blackbaud profile, he will click the link to create a new one.
- If he has an existing Blackbaud profile, he can associate it with your organization by clicking your name at the top right of any Blackbaud web page and following these steps:
  1. Confirm Association with the new organization by clicking Submit.
  2. Enter the confirmation number from the invitation email and click Submit.
  3. Update any information on your Profile, such as phone number and email address.

Depending on your turnover, I recommend spending about 10 minutes once a month making sure that your new hires have access to the resources they need to do their job, and that those who are no longer with you don't have access to things like your support case history.

How Do You Welcome New Clients?

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:22:00 GMT

photo by Crossing Sparks

When patrons become associated with your organization, either by purchasing tickets or signing up to receive information, do they receive any kind of introductory materials? How do you go about getting lists of new people who have expressed this interest? One great, fully-automated way is to use the Welcome Letter feature within Patron Edge. Not many organizations are aware of what this is or how it works, but it can really save time in getting a list of new folks. When a CRM record is created, there is a field called Welcome Letter in the client details section; in order to include this record in a welcome mailing, be sure this field is set to Yes.

After records have been created, go into Administration, Client Management, Welcome Letter. This will throw up some options to help narrow down the list of clients to include in the mailing, like when the record was created or a ZIP code range. Run it a couple of times on small sets of clients to get an idea of how it works, and make sure to uncheck the Save to CSV File option until you know the list has who you want. When the file is generated, the Welcome Letter flag on client records is updated so that they do not receive a letter multiple times. When the list looks good, check that box to Save to CSV and click Generate. Now you have a file with the same information that is listed in the report; you can take this into your favorite mail merge application and create letters or labels to send a welcome package. Following is one scenario showing how cool this feature can be:

A client comes to your organization for the first time to see a show or an exhibit. He had a great time and signs up for your mailing list. At the end of the day, you generate welcome letters and run the CSV file through your preferred mail merge program. If you don't use MS Office, I highly recommend doing your mail merge through the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite (you may want to wait a couple days to download it though; version 3.0 just came out this week and their site is being hammered from the huge demand). One version of the letter is for those who have email addresses and the second one is for those who do not; the second letter is nuanced slightly differently to encourage the client to give you his email address. Along with the welcome letter, your packet includes a brochure about your history and mission and a schedule of upcoming events. Now here's the nice bit; you throw in two teaser coupons for a nominal discount that the client can give to a friend. Some clients will use the coupons for themselves, but for the most part those who had a good time and signed up to receive information from you are the same kind of folks who will talk you up to their friends. You've just gotten free advertising from a credible source, and even better is that you can now track the coupon's effectiveness as a marketing tool!

Add this into your welcoming process for new folks. Come up with something awesome and creative, and most importantly be sure to share your experience in the comments. The Spotlight currently has about 200 regular readers and I know there are some good ideas out there!

Because even the A-Team can't find your lost data

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:31:00 GMT

A few years ago there was a Raiser's Edge organization whose building flooded during a hurricane, irreparably destroying all their hardware. They didn't have a solid backup plan, but they luckily found an old off-site copy of their data and only lost a few months of data instead of a few years worth.

Backing up your database is one of those things that everyone knows they should do. However, since backing up feels like a chore with no reward, creating a backup strategy falls by the wayside to deal with more urgent issues, like calming down the red-faced patron shouting at the poor new kid about his seat location. But like Baracus, I pity the fool who don't take daily backups!

Creating a backup plan is easy, so I encourage you to take a few minutes and set up a process doesn't break down when the database administrator is on vacation. There are four points to remember when creating your plan:

Back up your data - Use the Blackbaud Management Console or SQL Management Studio to create a backup schedule. Knowledgebase solution BB94455 can take you through doing it with the BMC; I promise it only takes five minutes.

Do it often - Set your schedule to run at least once a day, especially if you do a higher sales volume. Buying a bigger hard drive or more tapes is a lot cheaper than losing a week's worth of sales and memberships.

Take it home - You don't really have to take the backups to your house, but you definitely need off-site backup. In the case of the organization above, they took backups daily, but were keeping their backup tapes right beside the server. When the building flooded all of the backups were lost or damaged. It's crucial to take your backups somewhere safe. If you don't want to shuttle backup tapes between home and work everyday, you could hire Howling Mad Murdock to fly them in and out, or you can use online backup. There are some great online backup options like Mozy Home or Carbonite that offer unlimited space for $5/month and $50/year, respectively. There is Jungle Disk which uses the ultra-reliable Amazon servers and charges for the amount of storage you use ($0.15/GB per month, plus $.10/GB data uploaded). And of course there are the "enterprise" online backup solutions like Symantec online backup, which offer the same features and level of service as the folks listed above for an extra $400-500 a year.

Test it sometimes - Backing up twice a day won't save you if the backups are somehow being corrupted. This is rare but it happens, so at least once a month, attach the backup, run an Integrity Check, and make a quick cash sale or two to make sure everything is working.

Ahh, I do love it when a plan comes together.

Save Time by Deploying RE Integration Files

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:11:00 GMT

Two of the most time consuming things with any client-server application are installations and updates. If you have both Patron Edge and The Raiser's Edge, you currently have an additional step after installing an RE workstation (or updating a PE workstation) to copy some files into the The Raiser's Edge\DRE folder and register a DLL. Without performing this step after each PE update, you risk breaking the integration with RE:Export. In order to make life a little bit easier, I have created a small tool that will allow you to perform this process with one click. In a nutshell, it does the following:

Locates your Patron Edge Deploy folder
Determines where The Raiser's Edge is installed on the workstation
Creates the DRE folder if necessary
Adds CustomNodes.xml, overwriting the existing copy if necessary
Adds and registers PEExport.dll, overwriting the existing copy if necessary

While not an official tool, it's simple and safe to use. Just download it from here, unzip and run it on a workstation to deploy the files. System administrators could even have this run at startup as part of a startup policy script to push the files after updating the server. Now workstation users can just launch Patron Edge to run the main update and you don't have to walk 15 users through the steps of deploying the additional files.

Save time on the Administration site with Favorites

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:10:00 GMT

Sorry for not posting anything last week; I'll give you two great posts this week to make up for it!

Patron Edge Online version 3.3.3 introduced a completely new, redesigned Administration site to organize things better and make running the site easier. One of the best new features is Favorites. You can save all of the site pieces you frequently hit to your Favorites and access them from the Home tab with one click. The best part is that it's very intuitive. Here's how to create your first Favorite:

1. On the Administration site, browse to Content, Events, Shows
2. Now click the blue star icon in the upper left part of the screen
3. When prompted, enter a name for your favorite or just leave the caption as is, and click OK
4. Lather, rinse, and repeat, until you have all your most frequently used items favorited

When you log into the Administration site you start on the Home tab. Now you can just click Favorites and choose the place you want to go, eliminating the distraction of all entries that aren't relevant to your needs. A site administrator would choose items like Site Settings, Start Sync, Esro Logs and Check Connection as Favorites. For a designer or content creator, Favorites might be Shows, Designs for Tickets, and Interfaces.

What Administration features do you use most? Has the Favorites feature helped you save time?