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

Bible App Builder

I was introduced to this by the guy who is behind Bible Resources: how to find and how to share them. It's an application that allows you to build an Android Bible app, containing a single language. There's a good writeup of it here: Going Mobile with Translated Scripture. I tried it myself with some public domain English Bible text and it worked really well. As I've done Blackberry development I tried to see if the Blackberry porting tool could repackage it for the BB10 platform, and it could.

Update: The software has now been released: Scripture App Builder.
Update 2: A church in Northern Ireland has been helping synch the audio and the text without knowing the language! Apportunity knocks

Space travel and Bible Translation

(These opinions are my own - who else would want them?)

One of the problems in getting people interested in Bible Translation is that it's such a long job, taking 5 to 20 years to translate a New Testament. Other worthwhile causes that people support take place on smaller timescales. So when I was reading about another human endeavour that took place on similar timescales I wrote a blog entry for the Wycliffe blog: Which takes longer - a space mission or Bible Translation?, drawing parallels between the two processes. Our wordsmiths sprinkled their fairy dust on it and it was published this morning.

Kingdom Code

Awesome to have 60 people at Impact Hub last night for the "Kingdom Code" Christians in Tech event #kingdomcodeuk pic.twitter.com/BTZKenssIp
— Andy Geers (@andygeers) June 17, 2014

You can see me on that picture if you look very closely.

Kingdom Code was an event organised by Andy Geers and others:

Are you a Christian in tech? This event is being held to draw together a foundational group of Christians who work as developers, UX / UI designers, data geeks, product manager or entrepreneurs and who are excited to see mobile and tech used to serve Kingdom purposes. One output of this group may be to organise a Code for the Kingdom Christian weekend hackathon in 2015. 

The event was really well organised. After a bit of mingling we moved into a room with chairs. There was a brief introduction from Andy and Rupert Edwards and a big of plugging from the sponsors. We were then told to chat to the person next to us, and a bit later, to the person on the other side. There was a pre-event questionnaire asking about what people hoped to get out of the event and what sort of work they were in. There was a wide variety - not just developers and designers, but digital marketing people, business developments and entrepreneurs. I think I put myself down as jack of all trades. Some people were doing not specifically Christian type jobs (I hate the term "secular job"), but had Christian related side projects, in the way that Andy G does Prayermate on the side. Some people were visionary types who could see potential, e.g. in the internet playing a similar role to Roman roads which enabled the growth of the church after Jesus' death and resurrection.

We then split into 8 groups according to those types - I went with database/IT. After a bit we were then asked to mix about talk about this possible Code for the Kingdom event next year.

There was a plugging spot, where about 20 people got a minute to plug the thing they were involved in and ask for help, mostly volunteers or funding. There was a variety of visions for, say, easy software for administering churches, or helping those turning 18 who are forcibly returned to the country they sought asylum from, or getting the Bible out via mobiles. I plugged the paid job I blogged about recently. There was someone from Scripture Union who won the "oldest organisation" award, in contrast to the new ventures that people were working on. I think we came second.

There's another event planned in October, but I left before the end so I didn't hear much about that. Update: It's Monday 13 October.

Update2: Andy's written a post about it, though I blush to link to it.

I met a couple of people with links to Wycliffe:

• someone who did a short-term placement with us a couple of years who is part-time working on Tyndale House's online scripture tools. Update: they've launched a new version of the site now.
• Jason Ramasami who did this great picture for our magazine:
Post by Wycliffe Bible Translators UK.

It will be interesting to see what this event has started.

Really interesting webby/marketing vacancy

I've heard through a colleague that one of our partner organisations, SIL, is looking for a “Web Channel Manager”. There’s a brief advert on our website for it: Web Channel Manager. I asked the person who’s recruiting, Dave Pearson, for more information and they said:

We’re really good at developing quality language tools and content, but we have no idea how to make money from them. For example we've developed dictionaries for hundreds of languages and we've just started putting them online. We want the speakers of these languages to have free access to their dictionary, but if a linguist from Harvard wants to access it there’s no reason why she shouldn't pay something. We've got a wide range of software products to manage access too. And we’re pretty sure it must be possible to raise support through our impressive frequently-visited website, but we don’t know how. We want our various publics to have a good customer experience but nobody in our organization even uses the word customer! We need to do effective marketing, but we don’t have a marketing department. So if you have marketing skills to bring to our web presence then we’d like to talk to you.

As well as marketing skills it looks like you’d need a good understanding of business models for “content” and software, whilst being mindful of SIL's non-profit status. Fundraising experience would be good too. SIL's staff are scattered around the world, so good cross-cultural skills would be an asset. The position is based in the UK (ignore what the website says), but would involve travel abroad. Unlike many of the vacancies on our list, this position is salaried. If you’re interested in this then contact Dave Pearson:
dave_pearson [at] sil.org
Mobile: +44 7985256581
Skype: dave_pearson_sil