Thursdays from 2-3 pm ET: CRM User Group on Skype

Caroline Barnes

Our first Skype session was a huge success - thank you to everyone who joined!  We compiled a list of topics to discuss at future sessions (every Wednesday from 1-2pm ET), and the schedule of upcoming sessions is below.  You don’t need a mic or camera – we just IM together as a group to discuss best practices and share ideas and experiences working in Blackbaud CRM.

 

 

March 19^th - Data Quality/Integrity

 

• From BBIS
• From external systems
• Matching to existing records when importing
• What specific processes do you have in place to maintain data integrity

 

March 26^th - Upgrades (3.0 and 4.0)

 

April 2^nd - Workflow: Is anyone using it, and how?

 

April 9^th - Performance issues

 

• Who’s having them
• How to handle them
• Query

 

April 16^th – Reporting

 

• How do you use the report server?
• Do you build your own reports?

 

April 23^rd – Space/Storage Issues

 

• Is your database getting too big? 
• What are you doing to clean things up and manage growth?
• Global changes

 

April 30^th – Recognition Clubs vs. Contribution Memberships

• Which do you use to recognize donors?

 

May 7^th – Help Desk Support

 

• How do you provide your end users with support and connect with Blackbaud support? 
• Ticket triage
• Workflow

May 14^th – BBEC for Fundraisers: How do your front-line fundraisers use CRM? 

 

• How have you encouraged your fundraisers to adopt the tools that are available?
• How to ensure that their activity is non-intrusive
• Ease of utilization?
• Tracking steps and contact reports
• Have you customized it?
• What about the Mobilization options that are available?

 

May 21^st – User Training

 

May 28^th – KPIs, Custom Data Lists, Dashboards: How do you use them?

 

June 4^th – BBIS donations and event registration form best practices

 

• For organizations with multiple locations & service lines
• How do you handle multiple merchant accounts?

 

June 11^th– Your Blackbaud Experience

 

• When do you feel that you’ve achieved vendor results?
• Featuring special guests from Blackbaud to discuss the Product Discovery, IdeaBank, and bug processes

 

June 18^th– How do you use Blackbaud’s mobility tools?

 

• Mobilized queries and KPIs
• Web Shell on the road – have you used it?
• Mobile major giving

 

June 25^th– Mailings

 

• How to ensure that certain users are not mailed to (Do not mail to this address option, Solicit Codes, Marketing effort exclusions)
• Name Formats (how to handle couples’ addresses)

 

July 2^nd– Security

 

• How do you set it up? 
• How do you manage it?

 

July 9^th– Data interfacing with external systems

 

• Some organizations are writing custom query nodes to accommodate certain export fields to other systems.  How do you handle this?
• Import and export to other systems – how do you do it?

 

July 16^th– Extending the ETL in the data warehouse

July 23^rd– Ad-hoc query permissions and library management

 

July 30^th– Methodologies around client-side BBEC Project Development (SDLC process)

 

August 6^th– Direct Marketing

 

• Marketing efforts vs. public media efforts
• Source Analysis Rules (How to analyze them and what changes you made as a result)

 

 

To join the group, and your first session:

 

1. Download and install Skype.
2. Add carolinebarnes.bb as a contact.
3. When your request is accepted, you will receive a contact request to join the Blackbaud CRM Community Group.  Accept this request.
4. Once you’ve accepted the group contact, you can right-click on it and add it as a favorite contact.
5. On Wednesdays at 1pm ET, sign in to Skype and click on the Blackbaud CRM Community group in your Contacts tab (or the Recent tab).  You’ll see the previous chat activity and a window at the bottom of the screen where you can type to participate in the chat.  Here’s what it looks like:

 

Caroline Barnes

Hi Community!

 

We are switching our topics for March 26th and April 23rd.  We are planning to have organizations on 3.0 available to join the Upgrades chat, but those organizations are unavailable on March 26th, so instead on that date we'll be discussing Space issues and database growth/management.  On April 23rd we'll discuss the topic of Upgrades.

Caroline Barnes

Caroline Barnes:

Hi Community!

 

We are switching our topics for March 26th and April 23rd.  We are planning to have organizations on 3.0 available to join the Upgrades chat, but those organizations are unavailable on March 26th, so instead on that date we'll be discussing Space issues and database growth/management.  On April 23rd we'll discuss the topic of Upgrades.

Hi everyone!

 

We are considering moving our April 16th chat (Reporting in CRM) back to Thursday the 17th at 11am to accomodate organizations that are closed on Wednesday for Passover.  If you have conflicts with this time and are interested in attending, please "Quick Reply" to this message to let us know.

Caroline Barnes

Caroline Barnes:

Hi everyone!

 

We are considering moving our April 16th chat (Reporting in CRM) back to Thursday the 17th at 11am to accomodate organizations that are closed on Wednesday for Passover.  If you have conflicts with this time and are interested in attending, please "Quick Reply" to this message to let us know.

UPDATE: The Reporting session will be occurring at our regularly schedule time, 1-2pm ET.

Caroline Barnes

Caroline Barnes:
UPDATE: The Reporting session will be occurring at our regularly schedule time, 1-2pm ET.

Update: Our CRM Skype chats will be moving to a new day and time - Thursdays at 2-3pm ET - starting on May 8th with our Help Desk chat that was previously scheduled for May 7th.  All future sessions will be held at the new time, Thursdays from 2-3pm ET, unless otherwise noted.