Do all of your donors receive the same level of treatment? Does the donor who gives toward the Building Fund get the same letter as the donor who gives toward the Disaster Relief Fund? I’m sure you would say no. So why should all of your donors get the same boilerplate acknowledgement letter? The Raiser...

A little over a week ago I was at the Charleston Conference speaking with clients in the Customer Support booth. (A little shout out, if you were at the conference and stopped by, it was nice meeting you and getting to know a little more about your organization). One thing I noticed while speaking to...

We often get great feedback about our documentation from our users. Sometimes, it's a friendly head's up of a typo that made its way out into the world (d'oh!). My favorites, though, are when I get to help fulfill a user’s request or search for information by introducing them to a guide they...

There are some great tools in The Raiser’s Edge that will help you track regular donations and their activity (upgrades, downgrades, schedule changes, etc.). When I say regular donations, I'm talking about the Recurring Gift type in The Raiser’s Edge. If you don’t use Recurring Gifts, these are a...

This is a guest post by Nicholai Burton, author of The Patron Edge blog The Spotlight . Have you ever wanted to create an interactive map of constituents based on a query in The Raiser's Edge? One way to handle this (the most powerful way) is to get Microsoft MapPoint and the RE/MapPoint integration...

In our last episode, we explored the doors and windows that a simple set of parentheses can open (or close, depending on the circumstance) in your queries. In this episode, I want to go down another heavily trafficked road of query frustration that will hopefully lead you to the bliss of querying on...

This past weekend my wife and I visited her grandma in the hospital. While walking through the main foyer I noticed the Hospital Foundation's annual recognition wall. Seeing the plaque got me to thinking how useful the Donor Category Report can be. The plaque broke donors into levels depending on...

Does your database have attributes that you no longer use? Maybe you converted to Raiser's Edge from another system and now have all sorts of miscellaneous data in attributes; or you simply have historical data stored in attributes that are no longer used. Maybe there are so many values in the attributes...

In last month's "What's up with my Query?" post, we explored the mysteries of seeing double and triple in our query results. This month, we will take another look at our query results, but this time we'll take a look at the impact that a simple little parenthesis can have on your...

Is it hard to find your queries on the main Query page? Does it take forever to find the query you are looking for because you have so many? Have I got great news for you! The Raiser's Edge version 7.85, which is scheduled for release in July, has new tools that will help organize your queries. In...