Yes, we are turning it off and on again

The Wycliffe UK and Ireland blog contains a post about the project that is taking most of my time at the moment. For those who'd like more technical details, here are some:

The "all-encompassing systems upgrade" refers to the change from Raiser's Edge, our donor management system, to the Causeview app on Salesforce, as I've blogged about in my post Raiser's Edge to Causeview/Salesforce.

The main work before go live is both data migration and configuration. I've got a post in draft about configuration, as there's quite a lot that can be done, as well as some things you just can't do, without re-writing a given feature from scratch, or getting another app to do it.

In my previous post I didn't credit the company that's helping us with the implementation: Purple Vision. They have the primary relationship with Breakeven, the company that produces Causeview, in order to make sure that it does what we want (because Causeview does it, because they've customised it, or because we've customised it). They are also doing some training, I'm not doing it all myself.

If you want even more technical details, please feel free to comment or contact me directly. (Enough people manage to find me so I think you can work out how to do that.)

From Raiser's Edge to Salesforce

We have been using Raiser's Edge for over 15 years and we are considering a move to Salesforce. We are not the only UK charity to do this. At an event about choosing Finance Systems organised by Adapta consulting I met someone from a large, well known hospital who are moving to to Salesforce too. We are using Purple Vision for initial consultancy and whilst we haven't got their detailed recommendation yet, it looks like we'll be using the Causeview app for the things that RE currently does, and other apps for the things it doesn't do that we want to.

(All the opinions in this blog are my own, btw.)

(As I blogged earlier this year) I remember seeing Salesforce when they opened up the platform a few years ago, so you could create and customise your own screens. It took me back to the days when I was working on Dec Rally, a "fourth generation" programming language, on CRTs with green letters. Define your field type, give it a label, write code to fire to validate it, write code to fire when you move away from the field. All the same stuff, but on a web page. But it's in the cloud! It's the cloud! The cloud is the future! Having seen various buzzwords rise and fall in frequency in the Tech or Charity Tech press I get very bored of hearing about the next new thing (though "the cloud" as a concept is a few years old now). So if Salesforce is a web based (20 years old) front end to a relational database (45 years old), then why is it so good? I think it's because of the 8 year old concept of an App store (as came with the iPhone). There is a choice about which bits of software you mix and match to get what you want.

For the developer wanting to tweak or extend what you get with Salesforce and the apps you're using it's a mixed picture. Salesforce tops the list of Most Dreaded technologies in the Stack Overflow survey for 2015. On the other hand, according to my research seems to show that if you write your own app you can access to Salesforce built-in "objects", e.g. customers or those belonging to third-party apps, e.g. gifts.

The limits look like it's easy to fall foul of them. UK charities should be able to get 10 free Enterprise Edition licenses. That gives you 200 custom objects, which sounds like it means instances of objects, rather than 200 different custom object types. All the other limits seem reasonable, so long as you don't want to store lots of documents on there. For reports and exporting there is a limit of 2000 rows on the screen (although in theory you can export the whole thing) which looks like it means we can only post 2000 gifts at a time. You can only schedule 1 or 2 reports an hour, depending on your edition.

It's early days yet, and my research may be wrong. I'll will blog more as the project proceeds.

Blackbaud RE User group - news about RE NXT

I went to a Blackbaud RE User group on 23 October. They started off with introductions and some organisational changes - new CEO, new Account Directors who are over the Account Managers (one of whom has already visited me), and more work on improving support.

They talked about upcoming improvements to RE, including the long awaited change so that email addresses aren't linked to a postal address. They emphasised their commitment to working on RE, and at the moment seem to be slowly introducing ideas suggested on their UserVoice suggestion site.

There were some slides about Online Express and my blog entry on it got a mention.

Then there was a session on mobile, and after lunch, the thing I was most interested in - RE NXT (don't call it Next, they don't like that).

There are some good introductions to it out there, so here are a few links:

Purple Vision
IT For Charities
RE Decoded from Zeidman

If you haven't read those then this is the summary: hosted RE with a web front end that you can still access in the old way. The initial release in June next year will be the front end features that fundraisers use. In time other roles will have their bits NXTified until you can do every bit of RE without using the older interface.

My comment on RE NXT before I'd been to the user group was:

"I think one disadvantage of the fact that the underlying data is remaining unchanged is that we're stuck with the slow pace of change of that. For example, how long have people been asking for an email address which isn't tied to a postal address. I think I read this is coming in an upcoming RE release, but they only happen about once a year. I expect to see rapid updates with the interface, as that's easy to roll out, like with BBOX. I don't think we'll see the underlying data changing so quickly though."

I heard from a Blackbaud person that RE NXT will have its own data, which it's going to have to do to store, for example, someone's web dashboard layout. So it can build on top of the RE data, but it can't really break the underlying model.

My opinion is that RE NXT is a good direction to go with RE to keep it viable for a few more years. There is no data upgrade pain, though there will be a user education exercise. The phased approach to bring in the new interface will bring IT support challenges, but is also a more gentle process than an interface change for everyone. It also means we don't have to wait for years for Blackbaud to finish everything before releasing it.

Blackbaud Online Express direct debit bug workaround

My opinion of Online Express has gone a bit downhill since I discovered a bug in the Direct Debit functionality. It always seems to be UK specific features that have bugs. There was a time when after every RE upgrade I would have to check Gift Aid carefully to see if they'd fixed previous bugs and introduced any new ones.

The bug is that if the donor chooses direct debit but doesn't tick "Make this a monthly gift" then a cash gift gets created. Whilst it's possible to have one-off direct debits this cash gift isn't a recurring gift, and so you can't generate an instruction from it. I consider it a bug, but the person handling my case suggested I put something on the BBOX UserVoice website. So if you want to lobby Blackbaud to fix this you can do it on these suggestions:
Checked box as default for recurring gifts?
Allow forms which only have direct debit as an option

I've since been approached by a couple of people who work on BBOX in the US to discuss it, and so I've given my input there.

This is the workaround to make sure that people are warned if they choose direct debit without ticking that box. You need to put this code into the waitUntilExists code as described in my previous blog post.

Online Express - third post

See part one and part two.

One improvement on BBNC

Although OnlineExpress does less than NetCommunity can, there is one thing that it can do that NetCommunity can't - it can send an email to an organisation! I think the reason that Blackbaud have never put this feature in, even though it sounds like a really simple thing to do, is because they were tackling the bigger question of "what does it mean for an organisation to be a NetCommunity user" rather than "send to this email address on an org record".

Suggestions

There's a suggestion site for BBOX: http://bboxcommunity.blackbaud.com/ and with fortnightly releases the pace of bug fixes and improvements should be quite high. One Blackbaud employee spotted my original bug post, looked at my donation form, and suggested a fix for a CSS problem that I had. That's good service!

Bugs

I've submitted five support cases because of bugs, all of which are hopefully fairly minor, but annoying. I've found a sixth but I couldn't find the exact steps to reproduce it, even though it was repeatable at the time. (Update: 24 Oct 2014 - one went away, and three were fixed with an update that arrived three days ago. That's about six weeks from reporting to fix, which isn't bad. Since I originally wrote this I've submitted two more.)

Tweaking with javascript

I've previously published code snippets on this blog for ways to get NetCommunity to do things that it can't out of the box. Mostly these are just modifying form fields. Here's how I've done it on BBOX.

You'll need the waitUntilExists jQuery extension. Then you use it to wait for the donation button to appear. Then you find the particular element you want to change. In this example, even though you can customise the form so it says posttown instead of city, the placeholder text still says city.

Update:modifying gift amounts or designation is now built into Online Express - they are called magic links and when you're designing a donation form on the "That's it" tab it has a button to give you information on what to do.

Blackbaud Online Express - email

Hard on the heels of my previous blog entry on Online Express, here are my first impressions of the email component.

One of the drawbacks of the NetCommunity email offering was the TinyMCE-based HTML editor. Like many HTML editors it's hard to get what you want without diving into the behind-the-scenes HTML view. To be fair, part of this is the broken nature of HTML email.

What Online Express does is offer you little flexibility, which is it's strength. There a limited number of layouts. You can put in images, text (including links), images and text, divider lines, donation links, and social buttons. That's it. However the images can be aligned left or right of the text, which was always the problem with the TinyMCE editor. There are some things that mean our new emails won't look exactly like our old emails, but I can live with those for the advantages it gives.

You can pull in lists from Raiser's Edge. You can have a signup form. You can see stats. That's pretty much it, and that's all I think I want.

So far, I'm pretty impressed.

Part three

Blackbaud Online Express - my first impressions

I first heard about Blackbaud Online Express (BBOX) about a year ago. It's like a cut down version of NetCommunity that just does donations, emails and events, and integrates with Raiser's Edge. It's hosted, but you access it through an RE plugin. Probably like many other organisations we only use the donations and emails aspect of Raiser's Edge, so there's a lot we've paid for that we don't use. So I was very interested in it.

It also has a couple of other advantages:

1. It costs about a fifth of the price that we're paying.
2. It's hosted, so we don't have the overhead of running the two servers that are needed for NetCommunity. We could probably get away with one server, but we've got two currently. I know there are people who do hosted NetCommunity, but those prices are far more than the cost of buying and setting up two servers.

I've been waiting until they've had UK Direct Debit available before we started using it. It is, so we are.

Installation is pretty straightforward. You download an plugin. You need Blackbaud Merchant Services and Payment Services accounts (two different things). If you have those then you supply direct debit details - for the monthly billing, supply a few organisational details and then you're up and running and ready to create donation forms and emails. (We don't have the events module, so we won't be using those features.)

There are several steps to creating a donation form, but it leads them through you all really well. I think the effort they've put into "Discovery", i.e. web based meetings showing people early prototypes of screen design, has paid off. At the last step it presents you with the Javascript to embed into your existing site. The thing I'm doing at the moment is to tweak our CSS so that it fits in better with our existing site. There is quite a lot of control over look and feel as you design the form in BBOX, but I think it's better for maintenance to do the work in our CSS. There seems to be a bit more customisability than with BBNC, for example, section headings can be edited, and reorganised.

One thing it doesn't offer is the ability to give people logins, but although we had that feature, it wasn't something that was widely used.

Once I've got it looking how I want it my next step is to see if I can still do the same Javascript tweaks that I did on BBNC and documented in this blog. I also need to migrate our emails, so I'll blog about those things further.

Part two - email
Part three - suggestions, bugs, javascript
A bug in direct debit and a workaround

Blackbaud Online Express

Earlier this year I was given a demo of Blackbaud Online Express. I was told not to talk about it, which I dutifully did, apart from in oblique terms with close colleagues. However now it's been released in North America and in the UK and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

In a nutshell, it's similar to the email and online donation facilities offered by Blackbaud NetCommunity, but in hosted form only. (You can embed it into your own pages, so it's not like those online donations services where users have to leave your own site in order to donate.) As it is more focused by my calculations it should be cheaper. We have had NetCommunity for seven years now and we really only use the email and online donation facilities, so there's a lot in there that we're just not interested in. So Online Express looks like it might be just what we need.

I only really saw the email part of the demo and it looked similar to the functions offered by MailChimp (which I've written about previously when I compared MailChimp and NetCommunity) in that you could have templates for email so the person writing the email could only write in certain parts of the template, and not spoil the layout. I'm hoping to attend a webinar when they are available in the UK and I'll probably write more about that afterwards.

Update: 11 October 2013 - UK pricing information is now available and it looks very reasonable.

GoRaise Mobile for Raiser's Edge

I've been given a sneak preview of GoRaise, a new product from Shaun Sullivan, who used to be CTO of Blackbaud. You can see screenshots on the Electric Plum site. (It's only recently been given that name, and at the time of writing that web page hasn't been updated with that name yet.) It gives you access to a subset of RE functions from mobile devices.

It's a HTML5 product, so you only need a browser to access it, no other apps to install. The home page has recently accessed records on it, and then four buttons at the bottom - home, find (i.e. search constituent), query and info. Query lets you search predefined constituent queries. Find lets you search for constituent records. So you only have access to constituents (not funds, campaigns etc.)

You can view what would be on the tabs on a constituent record, as well as a summary page which has a pie chart and first, latest and greatest gifts. You can add actions to constituents as well.

Query results are presented as a list of constituents, each of which you can expand to display a few extra fields, and then the option to go to their record.

The information is presented clearly and simply, with probably just enough of what you need. The downside is that you don't have access to all of RE, but for people out "on the road" it's probably what they need to look up constituents and record the meetings they've had with them.

David Zeidman has another review of it.

10 years full time for Wycliffe - looking back

Tomorrow I will have been working for Wycliffe Bible Translators for ten years full-time. Before that I was part time for 18 months, in a software development role. I started a week before we were due to go live with The Raiser's Edge, a fundraising/donor relations system, if you haven't heard of it. We also went live with a new Nominal Ledger system at the same time.

On my first day the Finance director and his assistant came to my desk and said that we couldn't go live without 5 reports being created. After talking with them we agreed that one of the reports was for the end of the month, and so could wait. So I had a very busy 4 days (I started the Tuesday after Easter Monday) working on those and a million other things. It was also my then boss's first day on his job. As you can imagine it was quite hectic with going live with two systems simultaneously, but we got there in the end.

One of the aims of my job was to move the many different address lists we had around the place into Raiser's Edge. When we went live the two biggest lists - donors and recipients of our magazine Words for Life, had been combined. Ten years on and I've still got legacy systems to move into the right place. I still have four more databases to go, three of which are in progress.

I haven't spent the past ten years just working on importing address lists. We've also switched our Finance system to Sage, changed the way we send money to other Wycliffe organisations around the world, adopted a new group of inter-organisational systems, including a personnel system and re-launched our website twice.

Who knows what the next ten years holds?

You can't have it all

I've just finished compiling a list of places where we duplicate information. It struck me that software engineering is like any other engineering, you can't have it all. You can't design a car that is fast, cheap and reliable. You can pick any two of the three and design a car to fit those criteria.

In my previous job in an electronics firm the engineers had to explain to the management why we couldn't produce products in a short space of time, that were powerful and yet cheap. "Pick any two", we'd say, "and will manage those".

In our information systems we'd like them to be integrated, handle complicated information and be easy to update. One of the places where we duplicate information is where we've previously chosen integrated and complicated whilst having to put up with not easy to update. However the ease of update is has become more important so what we've sacrificed instead is the integration - so the data is partly duplicated in a custom system that handles the complicated data nicely.

In another place we have data entered by hand which exists elsewhere in a spreadsheet, so we can do a quick mail merge to get the data out in several ways. In that case we've sacrificed integration because the effort to type it in was easier than the gymnastics in getting the data out in those several ways.

Fortunately the list of duplicated data is quite short because the data is mostly fairly simple and so can live in the integrated system (Raiser's Edge).

Validating Direct Debits with Blackbaud NetCommunity

There's a bug in NetCommunity 5.1 whereby it lets your donor specify a one-time Direct Debit payment, which when it is brought through to RE doesn't work properly as it isn't a Recurring Gift.

In addition, we don't want the donors to do recurring credit card gifts as the current version of RE - 7.85 - stores Credit Card info in the database. (An upcoming PCI compliant release won't do this.)

So I've written a bit of Javascript to check the frequency and payment type and give an error message. Unlike my previous script, it doesn't have a hardcoded prefix which is needed to find the ids of some of the page elements. Instead it looks at a variable which is part of the donation form to get the prefix. This may mean it won't work in other versions of NetCommunity.

<!--//--><![cdata[//><!--
function xyzCheckDD()
{
var xyzPrefix = '';
var ErrorText = 'Please use \"One time\" frequency with credit cards, 1st or 15th with Direct Debits';
try{
//We look at one of the variables that's defined to find out the prefix for this page. If they go into four digits
// e.g. PC1001_ then this will need to change.
xyzPrefix = Page_Validators[0].controltovalidate.substring(0,6);

//Check frequency and Payment option. It doesn't have a unique id, so we find the checkbox, go up to the parent

bRecur = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'Recurrence1_ddlFrequency').selectedIndex != "0";
bDD = document.getElementById(xyzPrefix + 'DonationCapture1_rdoPaymentOption_1').checked;
//This does an XOR - true if they are different
if( bRecur ? !bDD : bDD ) {
alert(ErrorText);
}
}catch(e){
// Put some debug here if required
}
}
function runit2(){
Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(xyzCheckDD);
}
runit2();
//--><!]]>

Visting Raiser's Edge users

I've just started a project to visit all the Raiser's Edge (RE) users in our organisation. I'm doing it with several purposes:

• Make sure that people know where the procedure manual is and are following it.
• Seeing if they have any suggestions about improving it.
• Seeing if they have any questions about RE that they wouldn't normally bother me with, but while I'm there, they could ask me.
• Seeing if they need any training in specific areas of RE.
• Seeing if they need IT training generally.

One of the things I'm wrestling with, and I hope to get clearer on, is how to impart information about something as complex as RE. I touched on this on my post on skills in procedures. Off the top of my head I can think of various skills that you need:

• adding things to a list in a grid
• deleting lines from a grid
• adding things to a list which isn't a grid (add button at the top)
• switching between records using the arrow at the top, or the menu, or the arrow at the top with a dropdown

I think the trouble with teaching these is that people don't want to learn how to do things, they want to learn to do things. If they want to add information to people's records and I start teaching them to flick around then they are going to get frustrated.

One of the things I'm going to revive is the sending of weekly tips to impart this sort of information. I'll post them here too.

Raiser's Edge sign

On a recent trip to our Belfast office I came across a Raiser's Edge, sorry Razors Edge shop sign.

Changing Phone Types in Raiser's Edge, part 2

Further to my post on changing Phone Types in Raiser's Edge:
I found that Table Cleanup would fail even if phone types weren't duplicated for a given address. So I ended up changing them with various global changes, or creating an import file, changing and reimporting.

Further to this:
I found that Table Cleanup would fail even if phone types weren't duplicated for a given address. So I ended up changing them with various global changes, or creating an import file, changing and reimporting.

I also had problems with queries not finding duplicates. If I looked for

Phone Type one of "Old email 1", "Old email2"

it would fail to find some duplicates. I had to add

OR Phone Type one of "Old email 2", "Old email1"

i.e. put them in a different order

Renaming phone types in Raiser's Edge - and finding queries that use them

When you integrate Raiser's Edge with Outlook you automatically get several new "phone" types such as: E-mail, E-mail 2, E-mail 3 and Business, Business 2, Business Fax.

If, like us, you already have some phone types then that's annoying. I've found that you can't change the mapping of outlook to RE types, so if you don't want too many phone types you have to convert your existing ones to the Outlook ones. Mapping them is a future suggestion. (Here's something I found recently: if something in the Blackbaud knowledgebase starts with "unable to..." then it will always list something that's a suggestion.)

Converting the phone types on the records is fairly straightforward using "Table Cleanup". The hard thing is (and this applies to any field, not just phone types) finding which queries use the types, so that you can modify them to use the Outlook types. However I've found a way:

First of all you need the code of the thing you're looking for. We have an email type "Email - private" and I want to convert that to "E-mail". So first of all you fire up the SQL query editor and put this in:

SELECT TABLEENTRIESID
FROM TABLEENTRIES
WHERE LONGDESCRIPTION = 'your description'

Make a note of that number - you'll need it.

Then you want to find all your queries that use that field. Now the phone type, like some other fields, can be used in two ways. You could have criteria such as

Phone type equal Email - private

or

Email - private Number not blank

Here's how to find the query names that use the field on the Criteria tab:

SELECT
Q2.NAME "QUERY NAME"
FROM QUERIES2 Q2,
QFILTERFIELDS QFF
left join QFILTERVALUES QFV on QFV.QFILTERFIELDSID = QFF.QFILTERFIELDSID
WHERE
QFF.QUERIESID = Q2.QUERIESID
and (instance = 40nnnn or numericvalue = nnnn)

I've used nnnn to represent the number you found out in the first query statement above. The 40nnnnfor us would be 403027. For some reason the instance has a 40 at the front.

Here's how to find query names that use the field on the output tab:

SELECT
Q2.NAME "QUERY NAME"
FROM
QSELECTFIELDS QSF,
QUERIES2 Q2
WHERE
QSF.QUERIESID = Q2.QUERIESID
and (instance = 40nnnn )
order by q2.name

Institute of Fundraising IT Special Interest Group Conference

or the IOFITSIG conference.

(One aside: on the train up I noticed that hardly anyone had a tie on, just suits and open necked collared shirts. As I'm not a regular commuter I must have missed the memo saying that we don't have to wear a tie.)

I found this very stimulating. Not being a fundraiser I found the initial session from Alan Clayton of Cascaid (that's the agency, not the careers people) very interesting.

(Update: I missed out the Social Media Game. That link is about the session that I went to.)

I went to a session which had someone from Comic Relief. Obviously that's very big scale stuff, but some of it is applicable to even an organisation like us. For example, we've been getting people to run events recently.

"A Best Practice Framework for Managing a Big, Sophisticated Fundraising Information System" was about a Raiser's Edge implementation at Help the Aged. Much bigger than us, but good lessons to learn.

"Social Media feel the fear and do it anyway" gave me my to do list to take to the boss.

As an aside, it's interesting that the Fundraisers have their IT bit. The Charity Finance people have their IT bit. Where are the Charity IT people? There's CITRA, which is owned by several organisations, including those too. However their website has events from 2004 and 2005 on it, and nothing in the future, so that doesn't inspire confidence.

Raiser's Edge database schema

I just found a really useful resource on the user-powered site for Blackbaud customers. For those wanting to dig into the RE SQLServer database you can get details on the database schema in the file C:\Program Files\Blackbaud\The Raisers Edge 7\Help\RE7Schema.chm

All credit to Dan Larson.

Blackbaud labs

In case you haven't heard from another source, Blackbaud have a labs website where they preview new stuff:
http://labs.blackbaud.com/

Very interesting.

How to get your own websites on a Raiser's Edge user's home page

The Home "page" that an RE user sees when they start up RE contains some predefined links, e.g. Go to blackbaud.com, search the knowledge base.

Through the RE user interface you can't edit these to take the user to the web pages you want, for example your online procedure manual.

Here's how to do it through the backdoor method.

Disclaimer: this method involves modifying your RE database. This is a dangerous thing to do. Do so at your own risk.

Through the "organise favourites" option take a copy of one of the existing web links. Name it to whatever you want.

Then through the SQL Query manager run the following SQL command:

update userfavorites set linkid='http://example.com' where description='Your description';

This will change all the favourites with that name. I haven't found a way of adding a favourite to every user without doing it one by one. Even if you set up a new user and copy user settings, it doesn't seem to copy favourites. So it's best to create them all and then run the SQL command.

tags: Raiser's Edge