I was hoping to get some ideas, some inspiration as to how people use The Information Edge. We have had it for a while now and so far we have been using test examples but I am really interested in hearing how people have been using TIE in real world examples. Thanks David

We are new to TIE as of March '04. We are using it to create segmentations for appeal mailings, and using the smart fields to create pivot tables, charts, etc.(mainly by county(FL), gift type, constituent type,age of donor, amount. We are also in the process of creating monthly/yearly gift reports ie: Gifts by County(breakdown by gift type, const. type,) showing the total number of gifts for each county(FL), total amt. of gifts. We also have a acquisition program that has a unique fund number that we have reports for(or will have). We hope to create some core reports(crystal) , and some pivot table to place on Managments dashboard, rather than printing cases of paper each month. Just a footnote: Although we receive donations from all over the country, and some foreign countries, our main "appeal" focus is on Florida.(Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranches) Because of that, we focus our reports/analysis on Florida by County, Etc.

We are implementing TIE and was wondering how you made out with it, are you finding it useful? Is it fairly easy to use? We switched over from Pledgemaker to RE recently and wanting to utilize TIE to generate reports that were generated using PledgeMaker.

I think you will find TIE to be a pretty robust application. We are currently using TIE to calculate NPV as well as comparison of data. We have only been using it for several months now but hope to be able to pull data from RE and FE together and produce similar management reports such as what Ron mentioned. I would suggest you take the online training that Blackbaud offers, if you haven't already. I found it to be very helpful just to get the jump start I needed and to help take away the fear of such a big program. Good luck! Susan Decker Database Administrator VMI Foundation Lexington, VA