The Spotlight : RE Integration

Best Practices for PE/RE integration, part III

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:41:00 GMT

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.

Software-enforced rules
1. In Raiser's Edge you can define duplicate criteria to prevent duplicate constituents. Use Last Name, First Name and five digits of the ZIP. You can add more criteria, but remember that the more criteria you add, the less likely you are to catch potential dupes when adding a record.
2. In Patron Edge, define Duplication Conditions. Use Last Name, First Name and Email. Frequently this is all you can capture about someone on sign-up sheets or the web. Patron Edge can't do partial field matching, so don't use ZIP code here. However, Raiser's Edge can't match on email address so we take advantage of the PE feature.
3. Patron Edge Online is a different animal altogether because there's not a live person between the system and the patron. You can prevent dupes with a couple of Company settings. If you use the feature, remember the impact on the patron. If I get a popup when buying tickets online that says I already exist, but I don't know what email I used when signing up, I can't log in to use my account and I can't finish the sale as a new person. Catch-22. I either call the box office or give up on the purchase. I'm not saying to avoid the Patron Edge Online dupe prevention feature, just think carefully before implementing it.
Business rules
1. Choose a system of record, either RE or PE. Of course you can enter most data through either system, but when you're dealing with important donors/patrons, make a habit of working on those records from one side as much as possible.
2. Restrict access to add/edit records to those who truly need access. For folks who aren't trained on a system, only allow read access.
3. Train users to always search before creating a new record, and enforce the rule by auditing who is creating duplicate records.

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

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:28:00 GMT

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

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:45:00 GMT

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.

Patch 11 for Patron Edge 3.310 has been released

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:16:00 GMT

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.

Patron Edge 3.310 patch 10 is now available

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:48:00 GMT

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

Post-Conference Goodies

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:22:00 GMT

During the Blackbaud Conference for Nonprofits this year I demonstrated an application I had been working on that will instantly open the RE record for whatever PE record you're currently viewing with a single click. I promised to have it up on The Spotlight by the end of the week for all of you to enjoy, and I feel like it's finally finished enough to put up here. Here's the rundown of how to install and use it:

Download the following ZIP archive: Open RE Record From PE
Run Add RE Record Menu Item.sql against the PE database. If you don't want it in the spot for User App 01 or have installed Patron Edge to any folder other than the default, you need to update the script before running it.
Copy OpenRERecord.exe and Interop.BBREAPI7.dll into the Patron Edge application folder. This goes onto every workstation that you want to have the feature.
Access a CRM record in PE and click the link under Applications in the right-hand pane. You will be taken to the RE record.

And a few caveats:

This is not official functionality. It was not written or tested by programming so there may be bugs (nothing worse than an error message; it can't break your data).
If you have issues please leave a comment here or start a thread on the forums, or feel free to send me an email. Please do not contact the Patron Edge Support team, as they cannot help with this.
I wrote this in Visual Studio 2008, so it may require you to install the .NET 3.5 Framework.
I spent all my spare time for a couple of weeks writing this interface, so please leave a comment and let me know how it works (or how it doesn't)!

Happy weekend everyone!

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.