Assessing what kind of Raisers Edge Training is Needed

Claudia Sauers · October 2017

Hi everyone! Our organization recently transitioned to RE about a year ago so some users are pretty familiar while some are not. I am new (first week) and have been tasked with assessing the need and desire for RE staff training. I am thinking of developing some kind of survey or form that assesses what their needs might be and what they want to learn as well as what they know and are already familiar with. Has anyone done anything like this? Any feedback? Suggestions?

JoAnn Strommen · October 2017

Interesting idea. I think it might be difficult to get really accurate feedback. You don't know what you don't know. Example: I may think I know what's needed about gift entry but have no idea about using defaults which can increase accuracy and efficiency. Just thinking back to when I took BB certification. The topic I felt I knew the least about I scored higher in than the topic I felt I knew well.

Staff should be able to tell you what they feel then need to know more about/want to learn. But after years I know there are still things to learn. I'd definitely ask staff but also keep in mind that there could be other needs.

Andrew Ludwell · October 2017

Hi Claudia

If you're going to do a survey, keep it simple and with only a few questions. Keep them general, and have comments boxes. I don't know what your organisation or culture thinks about the word 'survey', but if it's not positive, perhaps think of renaming it to something else, e.g. "A Short Questionnaire on our Database". I haven't written a survey for my users, so I don't have a formula to suggest, but I got some advice during the recent BBCon:

Be in tune with attitudes and feeliongs regarding training etc.
Ask what they feel are their strengths
Ask what they feel is frustrating or needs to be changed
Work with users one-on-one as much as possible, as that allows you the chance to feel them out and read more than what they would write on a survey
Train anyone who asks for it
Offer different training styles, levels and options
Create and offer a recurring training if you have different needs, part time staff, busy periods, etc.
Get creative!

Follow up on anything that comes back to you. Surveys as a tool can sometimes lead to as little as a 20% response rate, so if that's the case, have something to fall back on like one-on-one discussions and people's desks. This is also good to introduce yourself and to get to know your people a bit more.

It might be worthwhile doing a bit of an audit of RE before you get too deep into training. You can perform a health check, identifying areas of concern through queries. Set up some data quality queries to check these areas and monitor. If there's need for improvement, offer that! Address any internal problems yourself as you don't want your people being trained by other people who are making mistakes or creating data health issues.

If there is some major problems or changes that need to take place, break it down into bite sized pieces and if you've got someone to help, delegate

I think it's also a good idea if you were to record and display your efforts and progress.

This leads me on to a major point: communicate. You're the new person on the job, so you need to find out why it is that your people are doing things one way, and if you think there's a better way, talk about it. Explain it in a way that highlights the improvements as a result of any changes. Maybe it's a time to start a User Group meeting in your organisation to get buy in from others.

Getting back to training, if you can offer an RE Tip of the Week, you can address small changes and create a collection of Tips and Tricks specific to your organisation.

I may have rambled a bit, but hopefully there's some ideas in this that can help you. Keep what you like and throw out the other ones! All the best in your new org

-Andrew

Alicia Barevich · October 2017

This isn't totally about "official" training, but I recently had a good productive conversation with a coworker, where I asked her, "What processes take a lot of your time?" I worked with her to create queries and utilize other tools to significantly speed them up for her. In some cases, you could point users to training...or have a survey question asking everyone to list the tasks in the database that they feel are the biggest "time sucks," and either work with them directly, or point them to training in a related module....which they may not realize is related. (In my case, she was just doing data entry...but could identify which records to edit by looking at Query Output - she'd never really used Query before, so had no idea it could help with data entry.)

Karen Hartt · October 2017

Claudia Sauers:

Hi everyone! Our organization recently transitioned to RE about a year ago so some users are pretty familiar while some are not. I am new (first week) and have been tasked with assessing the need and desire for RE staff training. I am thinking of developing some kind of survey or form that assesses what their needs might be and what they want to learn as well as what they know and are already familiar with. Has anyone done anything like this? Any feedback? Suggestions?

Hi Claudia,

We have lots of long term staff who still aren't as comfortable with RE and it's functions. I survey our staff every couple years to see what training they feel is necessary to do their jobs. I offer private trainings or group trainings on a variety of topics relating to RE. Most of the topics related to creating actions vs using the notes tab, adding solicitors, creating documents, saving emails as actions etc. I've attached my survey questions from the last round.

Assessing what kind of Raisers Edge Training is Needed

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