Name: Product Update Briefing - eTapestry (APAC)
Uploaded: 2025-05-06T01:16:05.511Z
Duration: 1 h 4 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - eTapestry (APAC)

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - eTapestry (APAC)": Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's presentation. This is our product update briefing for Blackbaud eTapestry here in May of twenty twenty five. My name is Nick Vlattas, and I'm in marketing here. It's my pleasure to get us started, before I'll be passing it over to two of my colleagues who you guys are all probably quite familiar with from seeing on a regular basis. That'll be Kim Hammer from, product management as well as Geoff Arbuckle from our customer success team who, will be going through, the latest updates that eTapestry has to offer. And Geoff will, provide some tips and tricks and best practices to help you leverage those tools, as well as just some other, continual, tips for eTapestry. Again, my name is Nick, so I'll be getting us started with, just kinda helping us get settled in and kinda taking you through the key themes that we focus on as we develop eTapestry, before I will pass it over to Kim who will talk through what's available now as well as what's coming soon. Then Geoff will have his best practices highlight, and then I will close this out with some opportunities to connect and learn more. And just some fun housekeeping to get us started in case you are new to Goldcast, which is what's the webinar platform you're viewing through. It's one way audio only, so you will be listening through your, speakers, so hopefully no issues hearing me already. If you prefer closed captions, you can access those through the stage icon at the top left at your screen. If you do encounter technical issues, you know, slides freezing or glitching, generally speaking, a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get working again. I know that's super basic troubleshooting step to advise, but more often than not, that does, resolve any issues and bring you back to live. However, if, you know, all else fails and you're just not getting the bulk of the material because of any technical issues, fear not. You will receive a link to this recording, shortly after we we wrap up, and you'll be able to consume that on your own time. To the top right of your screen, you'll see the q and a tab. So please submit any questions, you have there. We'll have a team of folks behind the scenes, following up on those, hopefully, in real time. If we can't get into it, in real time, we will be following back up with you. So in that spirit, if you do have questions, please be as specific as possible when addressing them. Don't just say something like when will that be available or when list be available. Please try and reference it by name just in case we are a few minutes behind. We'll we'll know exactly, what you're answering when we can more quickly advise it. And then finally, next to the q and a tab, you'll see the docs where you can access any resources referenced in this presentation. That includes a companion doc, which kinda summarize everything we're talking about as well as any relevant links or knowledge based articles or, opportunities to register, will all be accessible both in that docs tab. So please use that early and often as well as the q and a tab. And just a bit more fun with some boilerplate text to get us started, but today's presentation does contain forward looking statements that are always subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances. So any developmental projections, we present do not represent a firm commitment or guarantee. So with that being the case, just please make all of your purchase and business decisions based on features that are, and functionality that is currently available and known. I mentioned our themes, which we have, highlighted before. If you've been to any tapestry, pub before, you probably will recognize these, and that's by design. These are going to stay rather consistent over time. But as we do develop, each adversary, we do do so in these core themes. The first being to keep your data healthy, secure, and maintain compliance. We are constantly monitoring these things and making updates and building functionality to ensure your database is secure and running efficiently so you can rest assured you're being responsible stewards of all of your supporters' information, which obviously infinitely valuable. The second theme is to nurture relationships with those constituents, so we strive to release features and functionality functionality to help you deliver meaningful donor experiences, achieve growth, and expand upon your mission. And finally, the third theme is to benefit from innovation and best practices. So we aim to provide tools and features that will quickly identify, those opportunities for growth perhaps hidden within your database and streamline your workflows to make your teams ultimately more efficient. So with that said, I, it's my pleasure to hand the presentation over to Kimberly Hammer to take you through how eTapestry is progressing through those developmental themes. Kimberly? Thanks, Nick. Alright. In the following slides, I'm gonna dive deeper into some of these updates. But first, just a high level review of functionality that we've released in the last six months. To help keep you healthy, secure, and compliant, we finished rolling out Blackbaud checkout anywhere on the product or on our forms where you process credit cards, and we're continuing to make, security enhancements as they arise. To help you nerd nurture relationship with with your constituents, we've added QR codes and the option on DIY membership forms to set a different email confirmation for recurring memberships, allowing recurring membership purchases to receive a different email confirmation than one time purchases. And to improve your overall experience in the Tapestry, we've updated how communication templates are selected, improved the account user defined field report, made a few updates to standard queries, modernized sticky notes, enhanced query building, and searching endless. We've also added a new mass update option to make it easier to remove text values from obsolete user defined fields. So now let's take a closer look at a few of these enhancements. Starting off with one of the DIY updates, we've added QR codes to all DIY forms so you can download them and include them in emails, direct marketing, posters, or other signage. The codes can be downloaded from the DIY form overview page. Just click on the new, download QR code button that's located under the sharing section for any of your live DIY pages. When selecting a communication template to create a document or send an email from an account, you can now search for templates by name instead of selecting it from a potentially large list, if you created a lot of templates over the years. And if you use certain templates often, they'll now appear in the recently used section when you click into the search field. We hope this makes finding your templates a lot easier, and quicker, so you don't have to go searching for them. When building or editing existing queries, we now offer the option to hide unselected values for fields with 20 or more. My screenshot here shows country codes as an example, but another would be if your organization has a lot of funds, campaigns, or approaches. If you've built a query looking for a specific subset, then you can now hide all the unselected values and make it easier to actually view your query criteria. For eTapestry standard queries, we've updated the verbiage that explains that they cannot be edited, and we've also added a preview link. So you can preview the results right from this edit query page instead of having to back out and click the preview link on the overall query page. I don't know about you, but I was constantly in the habit of drilling into the queries, the query edit page regardless of whether it was a standard query or when I custom built. And now this, new link saves me a lot of time. I don't have to hit the back button and then click preview. So, hopefully, you guys are utilizing that as well. And then whether you're cleaning up an inherited database or keeping up with all the data privacy law requirements, we now offer a mass update option that allows you to easily remove text values from account user user defined fields. For example, if your organization no longer tracks full birthday information, you can run this mass update to remove any information entered in the field for all accounts or a query subset. And then just like our other mass updates, we add a note to the my organization journal anytime this update is executed so that you have information on who ran it and which account had information removed. A few additional miscellaneous enhancements to touch on. And the last product update briefing, I shared that we're continuing to modernize the UI and the Tapestry. And we recently updated our date picker and sticky notes with a refreshed look and modern colors. Keep an eye out, for more UI improvements in the coming months. Alright. Next up is probably the section I am most excited, to talk to you guys about. I'm gonna share a sneak peek of a few specific features we are actively working on and plan to release later this year. Both of them come from the Idea Bank. I've gotta ask, does anyone have any any immediate guesses? And one quick reminder before I I share them. What you see, is subject to change. We may make modifications to the prototypes, before they're released. So the first one, multiple sticky notes. So, soon you will no longer be limited to one sticky note of information for each constituent account. Instead, you'll be able to break it up into two separate notes with different sticky note typeset. And if your organization doesn't use sticky notes, but you would like a second note on the persona for each account, you can still utilize the second note option. You just don't have to set the sticky note type. So hope you guys are excited about that one if this is a feature that you utilize. And then the next one, if I could play drums, I would totally do a drum roll because I can't believe I get to share this with you. But we are working on the ability to add, subtract, or intersect more than two queries at a time. To help you build complex queries in a more simple and easy fashion, we're going to make it possible to combine up to six queries at a time. We know this is one of our top idea bank requests. It's been a long time, in the making, and we're excited to be able to deliver this to you later this year. Now I'm gonna hand it off to Geoff to share some key tips and tricks to help you further your mission by getting the most out of your eTapestry software. Thank you, Kim. And, yes, that is very, very exciting about the, compound query enhancements. I hope that there are some people here who, just recently attended my, compound query session where I said, you might wanna go to the product update briefing because there's something kind of brewing that we're excited about there. So, I look forward to getting more into that later this year as well. And when that finally gets released, I'll make sure to, have a webinar or something. But hi, everybody. I am Geoff Arbuckle. Most of you who attend, eTapStreet webinars probably know who I am. You probably hear this voice, see this face, quite often, in the monthly sessions that I usually have planned for eTapestry. But I was asked to, join, this product update briefing with some quick tips and best practices to kind of really help you get, as Kim said, the most out of eTapestry and to, really kind of use some of the features that are available that we recognize sometimes gets over, you know, get overlooked or sometimes not used at all. So the first thing I want to talk about is more along the lines of customizing your do it yourself forms that whether you are working with transaction forms or non transaction forms, these are tips, that will help you, really get a little bit more in line with, maybe what your branding is for your website, provide a little bit more, kind of color and enhancement to, some of the types of layouts that you choose. But, as it says here, of course, donors appreciate feeling secure when they're making donations. So we wanna make sure that as people are coming to your donation form, that they are feeling particularly secure that they are sending money to you and not to a potential, hijacked website or something like that. So some of the things that you can do to really help customize your DIY forms a little bit better, When you are actually on the edit section of the form itself, this is after you've done your settings, you're actually looking at the page itself and you are working on, the, you know, the customization and the fields that you may be adding there. There is an edit styles button that you can click where you can get in and you can, mess around with the fonts, the sizes of the of the words and the lettering of the various sections, and the various places where text is found on the form. You can also, change the colors, which also can, be, used for, like, background colors, accent colors, headers, and and the like. So you have complete and total control over how the page will basically look in comparison to the rest of your, website. And this is especially important when it comes to those, layouts that are not the embeddable layouts. The the layouts that we create for you. That's where you can really get, into the nitty gritty of as far as the background colors, the, the accent colors, and so forth. You can also, if you are using the embeddable, layout, the embedded forms also has a content width. So you can make it wider or narrower depending on where you're going to embed that code into your website. You also when you are working within the settings under the basic tab, you also have the ability to, customize your donation button. So if you wanted to say something other than submit, you can do that. You can also set a default country, and you can also set a language preference for the form itself there as well. And then the one thing that I definitely want to call out because this is something that does get that will get asked from time to time is, you know, we have a form that has, all of these different, dollar amounts or suggest the dollar amounts that we want people to donate. We do want to have a, form where we can ask people if they wanna make a monthly donation versus a one time donation. Well, when you are working within that section where you can set up your dollar amount, so your your suggested dollar amounts and when you can get into, what you want the various recurring options are, you can go in there and now rearrange what order the various recurring options appear. So if you would like to gently suggest to people that they make a monthly donation, you can have that first and then one time underneath that. Definitely recommend you play around with some of these options and kind of see how they interact with a, form. Of course, you don't have to publish it. You don't have to have it as part of the the page that is connected to your website. You can really, kinda get in and kind of see what some of these changes might be, available to you as well. And another thing that I do want to, mention also is that you do also have the ability now instead of having the dollar amounts listed as a row, which will increase the length of the form itself, you can now have them set up as horizontal buttons. So, again, speaking a little bit to that more modern look and modern, user interface, definitely recommend that you take a look at some of those various settings, the edit styles, and kinda play around and see what you might be able to do with your forms. Something else I want to bring up are the advanced mass email tips. This is something that gets asked about a lot. You know, regular communication, of course, helps keep your, donors and your contacts informed and engaged with, what you have going on at your organization. And because these are so vital as far as being able to help you out with your fundraising campaigns, I wanted to lay out a few, best practices to really help you, get more out of them and to maximize the effectiveness of your communications. First and foremost, I always recommend create a contact DIY form. This would be a great way for you to collect new contacts. It also helps you collect information about the people who want to receive communications from you, and it allows for them to also potentially choose which mailings they want to receive, which then brings me to my second suggestion which is to honor your contacts preferences. So if your contacts only want to receive certain communication, make sure that you're honoring those preferences. This will also help for you to segment your list appropriately as well. So if somebody only wants to receive a newsletter, they don't wanna receive, appeals or something like that, make sure that you're honoring that. And through those user defined fields that you have on your contact form, that will help you be able to appropriately segment those lists. Also, don't forget personalization. The communications area have the has the way to be able to, enter merge tags from the accounts that you are emailing. So be sure to personalize your message to really show that you are directing your message to the person who's receiving that email. It just is a nice additional way to make it feel like that recipient is the one that's being talked to and being, you know, being asked for whatever it is that the mailing might be asking them to do. And also think about your design. The best emails include a combination of text, images, or links to engage with. If this is a call to action, for example, like you want somebody to make a donation on your donation form or you want for somebody to sign up to become a volunteer, be sure to be clear about what you're asking. But also make sure that you have plenty of things that are I that are appealing to the eye and that will help people, really engage and interact with that mailing. The last thing I want to make sure that we talk about are the training opportunities in, Blackbaud U. When you go to blackbaud.com, you can go into, training and support. You'll be able to, explore the various, the the various, courses and everything that are available through each of the Blackbaud, solutions. If you go into the course catalog for eTapestry, you'll essentially see it kind of broken out in these two little panels that I'm highlighting here. The the first thing that you'll see are some call outs to some newer sessions as well as, a training path that you might be able to, take advantage of to kind of see, okay. Well, what is a good training path for me to take as an administrator or, as a development officer or something like that. And then you also have below that the ability to view what are the live courses that are available. That's going to be listed on the left. And on the right, you'll be able to explore the on demand e learnings that are available to you as well. Once you complete anything that is essentially a Basics of eTapestry course, I also recommend that everybody take the, certification test as well because that is a great thing for you to be able to advertise that you are a certified eTapestry user. It's a great thing to include on your resumes and it's a great thing for you to call out, on your LinkedIn or or your various profiles where you might be, talking about your usage of a Blackbaud product or what you do within your organization's mission. So these are just a few things that I wanted to make sure that I call out to you. I know these are things that I sometimes bring up in webinars, but these are always great things to, be remindful of and to, to make sure that you are able to take advantage of when you have the opportunity. And so with that, I believe I am handing things off back to Nick. Yeah. Thank you, Geoff, and, thank you, Kimberly, as well for, your presentation today, and thank you especially to all of you for attending and giving us your time. Before we do let you go, just wanted to highlight a couple of more opportunities to learn more, in the near future. Most immediately, we do have two more product update briefing sessions, which you, might be interested in because eTapestry integrates with both payment services as well as JustGiving, which is our peer to peer fundraising and crowdfunding software, now integrated directly to eTapestry. So, a lot of exciting updates coming in those areas as well, and you'll see on your screen there, couple of different offerings based on which time zone you'll be watching from. So, and you can also, as always, watch them on demand at your own convenience. So you can find the link to register for both of those, in that doc session I, recommended earlier. Additionally, excited to announce that, registration for BBCON is now, live with early bird pricing going on. So some, opportunity to get some early discounting if you know you can work it into your schedule. That's gonna be in October in Philadelphia. We're excited to be back in the Northeast, which we haven't been in a while. So, hopefully, we'll get to see some of you there. If you've been to BBCON before, you know it's, a pretty awesome opportunity to just network with thousands of your peers and, certainly learn more about eTapestry and how to get the most out of it, but also be motivated by, some very exciting, main stage events and, a lot of just really awesome, excitement around bbcon. So please do consider joining and be on the lookout for further communications about that as we start to, nail down, which sessions for eTapestry will be specifically available. So be on the lookout for that. And finally, if you aren't already, we hope you'll stay or, get involved in the eTapestry community. You can always network and collaborate with your peers from other organizations, kind of, you know, discuss fresh fundraising ideas, seek any advice on challenges you might already be facing, and, of course, influence the future of eTapestry by submitting your ideas to that idea bank. As Kim highlighted earlier, we really do take those suggestions to heart and work hard to, bring them to life within your database. So please do, you know, if you're ever having any questions about how something could work or if it could work better, please do highlight those in the community, and, we're always excited to, interact with you there. And that is all we have for today. So, again, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you, taking the time to learn more about eTapestry, and hopefully this will help you leverage it even more effectively moving forward. So, to quote Geoff as I've started to see more and more of it in his blogs, keep you tapping on. And until then, thank you all, and have a great rest of your day. We'll talk soon.