Name: Turning Insights into Action: Using Raiser’s Edge NXT to Transform Fundraising in Higher Ed
Uploaded: 2025-04-09T17:31:36.650Z
Duration: 59 min 32 s
Description: Turning Insights into Action: Using Raiser’s Edge NXT to Transform Fundraising in Higher Ed

Transcript for "Turning Insights into Action: Using Raiser’s Edge NXT to Transform Fundraising in Higher Ed": Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for today's session, Turning Insights into Action, Using Raiser's Edge and XT to Transform Fundraising in Higher Ed. My name is Ashley Clark. I'm a marketing manager here at Blackbaud. I am joined by several of my wonderful colleagues today. Our presenters, James Candido, senior enterprise account executive, and Kelly Marion, principal solutions engineer. And in the background on chat, helping me answer some of your questions today is Sophie Wilson, our marketing development representative. Great. So before I let James and Kelly kick things off, I wanted to mention just a couple of reminders about this webinar. You will receive a link to today's session via email within twenty four hours after the webinar concludes. And then, secondly, I wanted to point out our docs section. This is over on the right hand side of your screen, next to the chat and the Q and A. You'll find links to a recent customer story, our next webinar registration page for scholarships and our Blackbaud Award Management product, if you're interested in that. You'll also find a book a meeting link if you prefer to connect with Sophie in person after the webinar. She would love to speak with you if you're interested in NXT or really any of our products. And finally, for our current customers on today's webinar, I popped in a link to register for our upcoming product update briefings. Those are happening on May or between May, so you won't wanna miss those. Those will give you a sneak peek into our road map and what we've been developing for our NXT and as well as, our other products. And lastly, please utilize the q and a to ask questions of our presenters. They are going to hold some time at the end to answer anything that comes through, and they might answer some things during the presentation as well. If they can't get to your question today, we will make sure to connect with you via email after the webinar. Alright. So let's dive in. Kelly and James, I'm going to hand things over to you. Thank you so much. Awesome. Well, thank you, Ashley. As we introduce ourselves, I'm actually gonna throw up a poll because we're more interested in who's in the room with us today. So if you would, share your fundraising experience and your current role. We're gonna put that on screen here. There we go. And we're gonna do things a little bit differently today. I'm gonna introduce James, and James is gonna introduce me. So we'll see how this goes, James. Welcome to the webinar. James joined Blackbaud just over three years ago, having previously served as the VP of philanthropy at a university in Texas where he lives with his family. James served higher education advancement, prior to that role with this through line of building deep connections with this community to promote that philanthropy. I think, relationship building is kind of the underpinning of everything that James does. Outside of work, this is where, we have a lot of our conversations. He's crazy about his family and cooking. We get into really long conversations about pizza dough and roasting whole chickens, and, that's my my good friend, James. So I'll toss it over to you, James. Thanks, Kelly. I appreciate that. And if anybody wants to talk about a Blackstone and all you can do on there as well, I'm happy to to do that in the chat. So Kelly, also a good friend and very passionate about what she does. A little bit different is she started in, in the background. She supported all the fundraising in nonprofit advancement. Prior to joining Blackbaud in '21, she spent fifteen years in nonprofit advancement and program management at different places, including Illinois Tech, Lions Clubs International, and Colorado Preservation. So prior to joining Blackbaud, she was immediately the senior director of advancement at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Outside of work, we also talk about food, but she also enjoys playing in the mountains, running, skiing, climbing, and jumping all over Colorado. So thank you, Kelly, for joining us and, and navigating us through the system. Yeah. And we've got a really good, poll response so far. It looks like we've got most people sending in their votes. So you all can see we've got some advancement services, frontline fundraising, executive. This does tee up our agenda a little bit because that's the lens through which we're gonna do today's presentation. So hopefully, everyone in the call gets a little bit, out of today. And if you fit in that other category, tell us what role you have. Put it in the chat. We're super interested to see who's in the room. Maybe you're not even in higher ed at all. We'd love to know that. Alright. I'm gonna close down this poll. And as James mentioned, we both, came to Blackbaud from prior higher ed roles, but through kind of different ends of of that office. Right? Back end, front office. So we're also interested in kind of where you started your fundraising career. So I'm gonna put a different one up. There we go. So where did you begin your fundraising career? Was it in advancement services, as a frontline fundraiser, as a leadership team member? We've got some votes coming in. That'll also help us understand what to focus more on today as we're thinking about career progress for the team. And as we're here answering those questions Yeah. Made me think I didn't put it in my my intro, but I actually started in higher end in admissions. So transfer from admissions to advancement. So I've been in many different sides of the organization. But one of the things that always stood out for me as we were preparing on what would be meaningful to present today is talking about budgets. And we're getting to that time of year where probably should have had your budgets done, But in some cases, budgets for next fiscal year haven't been completed yet. Some years, we don't get it till it starts or a little bit farther beyond. It's always about something happening. So at one point, we were I was given a budget. I didn't have a say in the budget. This was the budget, and this was what annual fund needed to bring in. And the reason for that was they needed to have a 0% budget. We didn't wanna be in the red. We didn't need to be in the black, but we needed something to present to the board. So we had an unachievable annual fund goal, but we put it on paper and we passed our budget through the board and then, you know, we weren't successful that year. It was a little bit high. But you're gonna we're gonna show you how you can take information and data that's in your system, your historical data, and be able to help inform a budget. Be able to track a budget, not only from the start, from a planning phase, but also how are you doing towards your goal. You know, when we're getting up to your year end, the calendar year end, and we have all of the year end appeals and everything, and we have this big push that we all do. How are we doing? And are we gonna make our goal that year? So we're gonna show you how you can get that data from the system and use that to make informed decisions. James, I love that you shared that because I'm sure there's a lot of people joining us today who are also just given a budget, not necessarily based in reality. And so we wanna definitely help from all sides of that. Right? We saw that, a majority of the folks joining us today actually started their career in advancement services or admin, a few last in, frontline fundraising, and then the least in kind of that executive role, which makes sense. But we wanna help from all of those positions to help either, arm yourself with the right data to, you know, go forward with a new budget or or new information or, if you're in that executive role to make those decisions for the team. So we'll come at it from both sides there. Awesome. Thanks, Kim. I think we've gracefully transitioned to slides here. So we've only got a few before we get into the product, but I'm gonna let you kick us off with kind of what we're here to to talk about today. Yeah. Thank you, Kelly. And we have current customers on the call as well as prospective customers. Just wanted to point out that Blackbaud is a fully supporting higher education product specialist. We can not only help in fundraising, but we can help in multiple different areas. And we can even enhance your fundraising with additional products that support Razer's Edgen XT. We have a number of partnerships that we have plug and play included with so that Raiser's Edge still remains your single source of truth, but allows you to get information in and out in a meaningful way. We also have an SIS component, enrollment management, helping with applications, a lot of stuff. We've got our whole team of data scientists. Firstly, I think that's the coolest job title. I wish I could have that. But data scientists that are constantly looking at data and trends and analysis so that you don't have to. So that we can help you inform your work and and do it in a more meaningful and effective way. And financial management as well. We can help with all of that true fund accounting that you need to track your donor intent, to track all your grants that simply, you know, ERP systems that are built for student information system just don't have the capacity and the capabilities to do. And one of my other favorite ones is we can help you award scholarships. How many of you are awarding scholarships and trying to get thank you notes to get to donors and build endowment reports? We're gonna automate that whole process. I would have bought that every day along razor side razors and Gen XT had I known it existed. It is amazing. So feel free to reach out to us and just ask questions. Where are things that you're having challenges? How can we help? I'm sure Blackbaud can, help you in a lot of different areas, and we know that, you don't have time to go out and look for software. You don't have time to go out and find a better way to do your job, but let us help you as as your partner. Well, in the integration of those pieces, right, to have a connected campus where everything speaks to each other, I think it's really cool to have the full platform that we can bring and we can help you design the right components that fit together that are unique to your organization. We're here to talk about research at Gen XT today. So we have the full platform that can, kind of manage all of the different components that James was just talking about. But today, we're really gonna focus in on, advancement, operations, and a little bit of, engagement as well. Research at Gen XT does a lot. So this screen, I always laugh. It's it's very hard to read. There's a lot on the screen. Definitely take a screenshot, and you can get the documents in the, the little widget that Ashley talked about. But really, this is all to say that it's a comprehensive fundraising solution. So, if it's something you're dreaming up, Raiser's Edge can probably help you get to that goal. Most importantly though, Blackbaud is gonna be the partner that provides additional resources to help you utilize Razer's Edge NXT to its fullest. So everything from training to customer success to the onboarding experience. We've got those wrap around services to make sure we're not just handing you a solution, but we're we're teaching you along the way, best practices and and how to utilize that to its best. Now with that, we've got our agenda for the day. So we're almost ready to jump into the product. We're really looking at today's presentation through the lens of these three personas. So, James and I have filled a couple of these buckets ourselves. I think both of us have fit in all three of them at some point. But we're really excited to talk about how you can use this period of time, right, this this closeout of the current fiscal year and gearing up for next year to reevaluate how you approach all of your work. It's a great time to reflect backwards and start planning for the future, but you need the right data to do that. So we're gonna look at that through the lens of advancement services, through frontline fundraising, and then executives. How you can kind of, you know, review your current processes and, hopefully, grow them to new, heights next fiscal year. James, it wouldn't be a webinar if we didn't share data. As I mentioned, we do a lot of analysis. We can help you with trends. We can help you analyze different things that are happening in fundraising in general, in higher ed specific, what your alumni participation look like. How's your benchmarking? We can help with all of that because we measure it, and we have those statistics. So we also know that in the institutions that come to Blackbaud raise more money with our solutions. 44% growth in total dollars raised over five years, a 35% growth in number of donors, and a 48% growth in number of donations. And as you'll see through the presentation, there's a number of ways that we do that. We continue to enhance our solution and roll out benefits that are gonna allow you to be more effective, more efficient, and allow you to raise more money in a more meaningful way and continue with your donor stewardship, giving you insights that is unmatched in the industry. Thanks, Kelly. Well, let's pull up Razer's Edge NXT and start to take a look. We're actually gonna do the presentation in the opposite order of that slide. So we're gonna start with our advancement services team thing change things up a bit. So let's go ahead and share this screen. Make sure this is loading. Here we go. Alright. Well, we're actually gonna start with the kind of constituent experience first. So we're gonna talk a little bit about online giving. And I promise this does connect to our advancement services team because we're gonna make your life a lot easier with integrated forms. Something we're really excited about though is really thinking through the new tools that we've developed for RaiserSedge NXT, to capture data more efficiently and also along the way raise more money, through those particular platforms. So what I have on my screen here is our newly released, in the last, let's say, year, optimized donation form. This doesn't look like a traditional online donation form. The whole, kind of philosophy behind this is this high impact imagery and call to action. It's telling us to do something in the moment. Right? Make that gift. Do it now. We've seen a much higher conversion rate with this donation form than a standard form that runs top to bottom because of the way that we've optimized this experience for your donors. So you're gonna provide that that image, that call to action, and your donor is gonna move through this transaction really quickly, providing their payment details first. That means we capture more revenue more quickly, and you're also gonna actually see an increase in that average dollar amount as well. All of our, donation forms do have modern payment options. So you'll see Google Pay here. We've got Venmo and PayPal as well. That's also just gonna really enhance the work and the efficiency of our advancement services team. So you'll see here I prepopulated my fake credit card information. Upon providing that, then we get to the other questions of our donor. Name, email address, right, maybe additional contact detail, and also an option to cover those donation fees. So lots of goodness in the online donation forms. And whether you're a current customer, kind of thinking about some of the enhanced features that we have that you might want to take advantage of, or a prospective customer, we've got lots of options for online giving to help you meet those different goals. I'm gonna switch gears here and and focus on Raiser's Edge, in the back end now, really wanting to walk through some of the advantages our Advancement Services team has with online giving. So this is our gift management hub. This is really where our advancement services team is going to manage their day to day work. You'll notice below the fold here, we've got a list of unapproved batches. This is where all the gifts come directly into the system for you to put eyes on and approve. James, did you have something like this when when you were leading a team? Like, did you have to import gifts? I feel like a lot of people have to do a lot of manual importing. Did you have anything as slick as this? Oh, nothing as slick as this. Until we came to Raiser's Edge, I was it was very painful. Multiple donation venues. We had Square. We had Authorize.net. We had multiple ways to to get gifts in and not none of them were Slack. Well and, you know, the the user experience is really important. Obviously, the easier that we make that donation experience for donors, the more they're gonna give and the higher conversion rate we're gonna see. But it's also really important to think about your staff experience. So I pulled open a batch with, gifts coming in for all different funds, all different campaigns, but you can see that quickly in line, I can put eyes on these gifts, make sense of them, and then approve or edit. So if Daniel here picks up the phone and says, I wanna switch that $15 recurring gift from the athletics department, to maybe the Science Center Fund, we can make that adjustment for him and then approve this batch. So simple. There's no importing. And there's a few additional tools here that are gonna allow staff to keep data health top of mind. So So we'll go back into our, gift management overview here and just pull open what, some of these records could look like when they're not an exact match coming into the system. So we have the ability to surface up records that maybe have a little bit different information on them that aren't an exact match so that you can define how that data gets brought into the system. We'll use Will here as our example. You can see Will made a $15 gift, has an address on file, and Will looks like two people in the system. He looks like this person, at the same address, but he also is using the same address email address as me. I'm doing all these fake donations, so we've got some some test data in here. But I love this tool set for advancement to be able to stop duplicates before they make it into the system. This is a really fast review for us to link this constituent to somebody in the database already or spin up a brand new constituent record so we can keep moving on with our day. So lots of goodness here. And, of course, duplicates do make it into the system sometimes. We've got a whole tool for merging those after the fact as well. One additional piece here I'll call out, and, James, I think we joke about this a lot, but, you know, some of the the features for advancement services that we get most jazzed about seem, seem like table stakes. Right? You should be able to do all of these things in a modern CRM and and fundraising platform, but it's not really the case. The one that comes up most often, and I I call this out and ask people to put this in chat, but, this split gift option is super important. So if a gift comes in for a hundred dollars and that donor wants to split it into 10 different funds, we can do that in one gift entry screen. Right? We can just keep adding different splits here, choose those funds, those campaigns, those appeals so that we're allocating the funds exactly towards the donor's intent. I'll ask you to put in chat how many splits is your, highest amount that you've done to date. In our last webinar, I think it was 32, which seems like a lot, but I wanna see if anybody has beaten that. So put it in the chat if you've got anything really high there. Oh, and I love someone's calling out the data review tool. Sounds like they're using it, so that's great. Another key feature here is that we can actually automate some soft credit recognition. So if I pull up my friend Robert Mhmm. And if any of you have joined webinars in the past with us, Robert, gets utilized a lot. You'll notice his spouse and his company are pre automated to receive soft credits for this gift. This is a huge time savers for advancement services. Seems like a very small detail. It's one field, but you don't have to go back to a record to see who the spouse is and add that information. We're gonna prepopulate that for you based on workflows we have built in the system. I'll pause there. Yep. That could be correct. Anything else? Well, I was saying we've got 28 right now. Twenty one and ten. Yeah. And Danielle did it to herself. She split her own gift 10 times. I love it. Well, fear not. You can do that all in one screen here. We've also got a batch as well if you prefer to, have more of that Excel type of add in where you're tabbing through gifts. This is more of that single entry experience that we've got on the screen. Alright. I'm gonna switch gears here a little bit, James. Anything else we wanna call attention to for advancement services before we flip over and talk a little bit about our frontline price fundraising team? Yeah. I think just wanted to add that Blackbaud is our own merchant service provider. So you don't have another place to go to get that. I think I wanted to make sure that you understood that we'll take care of everything from the gift processing. And then also, you saw that you could the donor could increase the gift. We have what's called complete cover. So if you use our donation forms and use complete cover, even if the donor does not increase their gift to cover the processing fees, Blackbaud will. So that thousand dollar donation, you will still net a thousand dollars. So on average, we're seeing customers saving about $14,000 a year that use our complete cover forms in processing fees alone. Thanks, Kelly. Yeah. Of course. And, actually, I'm checking our questions right now, and I wanna answer, a few of them just as we're talking about gift entry before we move on. So, talking about those split gifts, just know that from a reporting perspective, you can look at, any of your gift entry from both the gift level. So we can see that full view, and we'll look at that a little bit later on a constituent record. So we can see that Robert made a hundred dollar gift. But we'll also see in all of the financial reports and, you know, fund level detail that specific breakout. So it really depends on the reporting that you're trying to get out of the system. Such a good question, you know, related to today's topic. We're really wanting to help uncover new ways of getting information to make those informed decisions to set you up for for next fiscal year. And I think that's a really good call out that, the the answer is you can pull the data in a way that makes sense to you. If you wanna see it from the gift level, we've got those reports. If you wanna see the individual breakouts, we have that as well. And then, of course, for gift entry, you can add custom information as well. I didn't show that on my screen, but one of the questions we got is just on, you know, additional detail for those gifts. So we've got custom fields that can be added during gift entry, lots of other gift types as well. So if you're interested in kinda double clicking on that, we'd be happy to do a a deeper dive demo, and, you know, my my colleagues can help you by putting, stuff in the chat to to get you all lined up for that, that session. To transition a little bit to our frontline fundraising team and and kind of keep a foot still in advancement services, we're gonna preview prospect insights. This is a tool that is really helpful for our prospect research team or folks that are responsible for that on a day to day basis. So James and I would love to know who in your department, who on your team is responsible for making new qualified prospects or adding them to portfolios. So you've got these qualified prospects, right, maybe 19 or 20 of them. Who actually makes those assignments in your office? I love them. Me. That's great. Alright. Well, keep putting that in chat. We think this is probably a wildly different answer for all of your teams, but we're gonna show you a tool that helps you surface up those individuals and make quick decisions on who to spend your time on. Prospect Insights Pro, is a data intelligence tool that we have here at Blackbaud. And, James mentioned we have a whole team of scientists here that help us to, not only, you know, develop the data that goes into these tools, but, also consult on this as well. So we've got lots of, you know, different levels of, consult consulting that we can do to to help you with these data projects. I'm gonna start with this qualified prospect pool here just to show the type of information that we're able to surface on your entire database. So this is telling me that I've got, 1,500 top prospects to qualify. So I wanna put eyes on those. I wanna decide maybe which portfolios they're gonna go into. And, you know, if I wanna take a second look, maybe prospects that are emerging or have the potential to be a major gift prospect down the road and I wanna, feed those into some portfolios as well, I can go through a different queue here to, evaluate those prospects. We've also got some needs attention areas. So this is where we're gonna line up, a bunch of those prospects for you to, again, put eyes on and start to, make sense of. The idea here with all of these queues is that we're giving you enough information to get to the next step in your process. We don't want you to spend hours and hours diving deep into every little data point here. The goal is to go have a call with this individual. Right? Take them out to lunch. Don't spend two hours diving into detail about one person. Take that next kind of personal interaction and outreach. So, our example here on the screen, we've got a, a great potential fake prospect here. And we can see that we're given a target gift range, a giving likelihood, a potential gift range, and a planned giving likelihood. So again, different folks in the organization will get benefit from this tool depending on your role that you're, serving in. We've got some biographical details, so we're gonna pull through maybe address, constituent codes, if they're already in the database where we're pulling through some of that information, whether they're currently assigned to a fundraiser or not, and any last actions. So this tells me that Daniel here hasn't been doing, great outreach to this prospect and needs to reengage this this person. We've got a snapshot of giving, so both giving to other organizations as well as giving to your organization. So, again, we're we're surfacing that detail for you in one place. And then providing some key wealth indicators. So things like estimated wealth, real estate, business ownership. Again, really important information for you to make an informed decision on how you're going to engage this individual. James, what was your experience using tools like this in in your prior role, and and how would you go about kind of guiding a customer, who's new to maybe ProspectInsightPro today? So a year ago or two years ago, so I didn't have the benefit of using this. Prior to that, building portfolios was it was a little scrappy. Especially if somebody wasn't in a portfolio, you as a gift officer could go find them and add it to them, so you're pulling different reports, trying to look for nuggets. By having it served up all in one place is unbelievable because we have a lot of folks in your portfolio, and we know that people keep people in there that may be under giving that really shouldn't be in there, but we don't know that we should be taking them out. So we can help streamline that. The other thing I wanna add, Kelly, is when somebody makes a gift online, when somebody attends an event using our Blackbaud registration forms, they're all in the system. And once they're added to the system as a new constituent, of course, we're gonna check if they're duplicate. The following day, all of this data is in the system. So if you have an athletic event coming up and people have registered for it or a new parent dinner and you've used the registration page, you now have all that data at your fingertips. And that's important because now you can also know at events and in person things who you wanna make sure that you make connections with or that the president makes connections with. And it's just critically important. Having it served up in one place is, is phenomenal. Talk to a lot of customers and prospects that they'll do a wealth screen, you know, sit in an Excel thing, and people will kind of forget about it. They'll do it once and done, and it's not part of their their daily work. So Right. And, you know, we failed to mention that this is a tool that's using artificial intelligence. It's actually learning your, preferred kind of actions here. So as I start to approve and move folks through the pipeline, the tool is learning how I like to place those into portfolios, who we believe at our organization is a good prospect based on all these data points. So it's also, kind of a a learned tool here, which is really exciting because it's only going to get sharper over time. I do see a question in the chat that I wanna call out here. For current customers on the call, everyone that gets Raiser's Edge NXT does get prospect insights in their solution. So this comes out of the box. It's a tool we feel really strongly about that, all of our customers need. I do have on my screen an up, you know, a level up of that that's called Prospect Insights Pro. So the difference is just a few more data points. Prospect Insights Pro does have, additional data that is not in the out of the box version, one of those key points is planned good life planned giving likelihood. So depending on where you are in your, fundraising journey, if you're gearing up for a capital campaign or maybe starting a planned giving program, we can help guide towards the best, data intelligence offering for you. So great question there, but everyone does get a Prospect Insight subscription out of the box with RaiserSedge. Alright. I'm gonna switch gears here and, kind of take this to once we've qualified someone. So Jose here is our example. We've decided, you know, he's an under giving prospect, and we want to further engage him to, you know, consider a major gift. Well, how do we keep track of all of those conversations, all of the different touch points that we need to schedule out and, potentially build out in terms of a proposal or an opportunity framework. We're gonna do all of that in our work center. So work center is unique to each fundraiser. This is where we have our portfolio, maybe a list of gifts that we're managing. So think pledges, upcoming payments that are due, and then those opportunities for, larger gifts. This is not unique to major gift fundraising for individuals. We can use the same, set of tools here for foundations, grants, sponsorships. So same tool set, different application depending on your role in the org. I'll click on my portfolio here and you're gonna start to see, a structure here that is carried throughout Raiser's Edge. And this is just, kind of a list format. So we're gonna provide information in this column and row structure that allows you to easily sort and find the information you're looking for. So your portfolio is likely bigger than mine here of 34 people. So you might need to come in and find specific individuals that you're wanting to further engage. Maybe you're out in the road and you need to find additional, schedule additional meetings for that anchor meeting that you've already got scheduled. We can come in here and, you know, sort our portfolio by address or find constituents that have a specific code attached to them or even look at our portfolio based on how many gifts they've made recently. Really easy to use toolset. So anything I'm toggling into here, is super user friendly, does not take a ton of, you know, lift in terms of learning how to use this, really easy toggles and filters that you can apply to change the listings that you have in all of your lists here. If I keep going forward here though, I'll see similar, structure but different information. So this list I think is probably the most impactful for our frontline fundraisers. This is your to do list for the day. This is a list of actions that are scheduled out that you've determined will move the needle forward for your relationships. This could be, and again this is a great example here, not just specific to our individuals. This is everything from grant stewardship to sponsorship outreach. This is a toolset that's going to allow you to schedule upcoming interaction that you need to have with all of those audiences to, you know, hopefully get to gift in hand. So we'll search for that constituent. We'll set up the type of interaction that, we're looking to have, include a summary here, and then, of course, attach this to our calendar. So, as James knows, I, am crazy about my calendar, and I like to have all of the things I'm gonna do kind of wind up in little fifteen minute increments throughout the day. This would allow me to have this just visualized on my calendar. And if I came in to make adjustments, this would be pushed to my calendar as well. So really nice way to, meet you where you are if you prefer to work that way instead of, coming into the work center to see a list. Rolling this forward just kind of to a a larger framework here, this list is going to provide a nice, landing page for all of your proposals and opportunities in pipeline. So these are opportunities that are specific to me. So I have some sort of, stake in this proposal, whether it is, an endowment gift, maybe a grant for research, a planned gift, whatever that framework is that you're wanting to structure, we can outline all of the different components from ask amount to expected, the deadline, and and roll that forward so that we're keeping nice and tidy all the particulars for that proposal. I'll pop into one just to show what that looks like from a, a bigger perspective here. This is, an example again for our our grant team or our foundation team where we've actually received funding here. I love this call out because it goes back to our advancement services team. We're gonna be able to connect all the gifts that come in to outstanding proposals so that we can always, you know, double click more into that information and, you know, ensure that we've got everything nice and tidy in one digital file folder here. James, I'm curious, you know, and I know that this has evolved since you've come to Blackbaud, but, were you more forward looking in your previous roles or or, was it, you know, maybe entering those call reports after the fact or a mix of both? Definitely a mix of both. But, the other thing is always looking for stuff. So just seeing the attachments here is a reminder that I didn't have to go to a a file folder in some cases or a shared drive to get a document that I needed that was related to a donor or to an, a foundation or anything like that. So, yeah, just seeing all of this again is just a reminder of how things can be better in in an easier way. We do have a question from Michelle about the the likelihood, giving likelihood. So how that's calculated and determined. So all of our data analytics use proprietary information, publicly information data, as well as informations from your system and a donor's attributes. So a combination of that with AI comes up with a likelihood score. And if you're interested in getting more detail about that, we can, schedule another call to kinda dig in deeper about the data intelligence that goes along with that. But it is specific. It's not just purely a a wealth screen, if you will. You know, we always joke that some folks that I've worked with before, you know, think somebody has money. We need it. That's simple transaction. Let's just make that happen. That's not the case. So it's not just based upon on their wealth. But we do have very reliable information in there, for example, around discretionary income. So as gift officers and frontline staff or annual appeal folks are are coming up with a proposal, using that information to say, okay. This person has some discretionary income, and we can give you a good range of that so that you know that your gift ask is not way out of line from from what they're capable of doing. Yeah. The other piece that I was thinking about as we go back to, when you're done, I wanna chat about the overview section of the work center, but I'll let you continue. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's actually go back because I, I I was checking my notes too, James, and I think there's, like, two things to point out here. I do wanna call out to Danielle in the chat that, everything we're showing in the work center here is included with Raiser's Edge NXT. So using an opportunity or a proposal for a grant, that's included. So you should if you're a current customer, you should have that, that functionality. And if not, we can help you, ensure that you get set up for that. But that's that's out of the box, functionality for you. Yeah. So what I liked about the work center here, and you can see up top, you can change fundraisers. So Oh, yeah. As a a supervisor, being able to go in and help manage and code, we know that the only constant is change. So we always had an open position. Right? We're always trying to hire somebody, and we're always trying to make sure that they're doing a good job. Yeah. So one of my first questions, and this was one that I battled with all the time was, how do you objectively measure a frontline fundraiser's performance? So I'd love for you guys to put that in the chat on how you do that. Do you do that on a number of proposals that they need to have done each month? Is it on total dollars raised? One of the ones that was, going around for a while was meaningful interactions. How many meaningful interactions were done and those goals that were set up there? So we'd love to know how you guys are measuring performance for a gift officer. The piece that I like about the the, the work center and being able to coach somebody is it's not punitive. Right? We can find out how they're doing and find out what barriers there are between them making their calls, getting on their visits, talking to the right people. We can help coach that. It was always my goal to be able to remove anything that was holding them back from being in front of a donor. Whether that's at an event, whether it's in their living room, whether that's meeting at a coffee shop, whatever that is, there's only a finite amount of time during the week that they can be doing that. So all of that other stuff, we wanna remove from their their day to day. And that's why the work center helps you do that so that you can help somebody be proactive. Once somebody is successful, the likelihood that they're gonna continue and stay also helps minimize your folks leaving and having to hire new people. And I don't know. Did you experience that too, Kelly? Absolutely. And, you know, as you were talking, I'm just, like, wanting to add more and more and more to show the group on on how to pull forward those, those different goals. And, you know, we talk to so many organizations that do track this differently, but I am I'm interested in how folks on the call today are are are measured or, maybe they're not at all. Right? I know we've talked to organizations that don't really have a framework for measuring success and, that can also be difficult when you are hiring new staff to, you know, onboard and, maybe they they don't know how their success is going to be measured a year into the role. So Yeah. As you were chatting there, I wanted to pull up another screen. And, this is something we're really excited about, and this might be the first, webinar we're showing this in. This is a new feature that we've released. So current customers, you should see this now in your environments. This is the new home page. So typically this is like where we start our day, although we're, almost through the webinar and and we're just looking at this now. But this home page is customizable to each user. So no matter what your persona is or what, you know, hats you wear at the organization, knowing that a lot of you do many components, of advancement and advancement services, You're gonna be able to set this up to measure those different key performance indicators. So James was mentioning, you know, being able to track a team's performance. I can actually set up my team here to be a select group of individuals so that I can look at how they're tracking towards success. You'll notice that, the goals changed from looking just at my portfolio. We can see, you know, just these these high level really important details, and we can also dig further from each of these tiles to get more information. So we've got a tickler here of recent gifts. We've got our pipeline, and we've got a reminder of upcoming, you know, actions that need to take place. So a different way to get at similar information that we've seen throughout, but I think the key here is just getting your hands on data to make more informed decisions, whether that's quick snapshots like this or, more in-depth reports, which we're gonna look at next. Alright. It is unbelievable to put that on one dashboard on one page just to have a a look at that. Yeah. Try the way you're saying. Right? Like, it links through too. So anything in blue would allow you to hyperlink to additional information. So it's I I think it's really actionable that we can see that information and go, oh, I I wanna dig into that a little bit more today, if that makes sense. Yeah. Totally. And the other piece is it's out of the box. It works this way. You don't need to program it. You don't need to hire somebody to do some custom coding or anything like that. Out of the box, this is what's available to you. And you have it all at your fingertips because we know what fundraisers need to do because we've been doing it for forty years. Speaking of out of the box, we're gonna talk about some tools that, again, everybody at the organization is gonna be able to utilize, but this is really focused on our leadership team. So how are you looking backwards at your success, whether that's a campaign, maybe a a fund initiative, or even, as we saw in the chat, some of those meaningful visits and, and opportunities created, how are you gonna keep track of that in a, cohesive, concise way and potentially report out to the full organization. We know that a lot of organizations struggle with reporting and have to do a lot of this outside of their system. So exporting large amounts of data using Excel or Tableau to visualize it. That's not needed with Razer's Edge NXT. So I'm gonna show you some out of the box dashboards, which means it's available day one, and we're gonna provide all of the filters that you need to refine the data based on what exactly you're trying to get at. So this example here is a a campaign dashboard. So I can preview my capital campaign, maybe endowment, you know, annual fundraising that I'm doing. Everything in yellow here, highlights my goal. So where am I tracking towards? And then that blue bar is a snapshot of where I am based on the parameters in my dashboard. So I've looked at, in this case, just a, snapshot in time, you know, q one last fiscal year. And by putting those different parameters on, I can actually double click into any of the information on my screen to understand the performance a little bit more. So in this case, when I click into that capital campaign, 7,200,000.0, wow, we've done pretty well for ourselves there, James. I get a list of the the 1,400 folks that make up that period of time from last year. So this could be the start of, you know, an email campaign to let this group know how the campaign's going. It could be the start of, an email to invite these constituents to an upcoming event where you're, you know, unveiling, a new space. The hard part here is strategizing what to do with the data, not actually pulling the data, which we hear from a lot of different organizations tends to be, where more time is spent. We've got lots of different ways to slice and dice this as well. So progress to date, I love seeing this just in total number of gifts, percentage to goal. We're gonna call all of that out for you so that you don't have to do the hard work. And then we're gonna continue to not only visualize this data, but break it down into all of these different segments for you. So if we think about, campaigns by giving level, I love this. This is gonna tell me where most of my gifts are coming from. So for my annual campaign, looks like a majority of my gifts have been in that 5,000 to 10,000 range. So I might do additional outreach to to target more gifts, whatever my messaging has been for this, annual campaign. It's been really successful for this group. Let's lean into that a little bit more. Right? Or maybe let's spend a little bit more time on areas that aren't doing so well. We can do a little bit better here. All these dashboards again are out of the box. We've got, many different varieties of these dashboards. So this is just one example, a campaign dashboard, but we've got them for funds, for appeals, for retention, tracking actions by our fundraisers. And also note that we can schedule any of these out. So if you, like me, like to start the week with all your information kind of in your inbox, I like to work through my email Monday morning and see what my week is, shaping up to be. This can be scheduled out to land in your inbox Monday morning at 8AM and then includes both internal and external stakeholders. So, James, if you had a committee, you could have kind of scheduled this out and and have that in their hands as well. Was that maybe something that you were doing or, would have liked to have done? No. Yeah. If we did it and it went to the president's team and the provost council every Monday morning. Here's how we are doing for fundraising. This is how our performance is. We also had our board report set up in this as well. There's nothing better than having that in somebody's office or in their inbox so that they can look at it when they want, and you get full transparency. Right? You're trying to build a culture of philanthropy at your institution, and you need to be transparent about it. We also have employee giving that's critical to it. So we wanna be able to tell that positive story. Employees are often, a major part of fundraising campaigns. And so we need to be clear about that and and share that information. A couple questions we've got here is custom reports. And so, yes, you can build any custom report. So think about, you know, we've got showing you year to date how you're doing. You know, let's you can analyze into an appeal on how well it's doing. You can decide to, oh, we're short. We're behind. We need to schedule another appeal that wasn't on the calendar. We need to make up some time. Things change, constantly, so you wanna be able to do that. So you can do any report. If you wanted to do, for example, you mean alumni that live in a certain area that have given over a thousand dollars but haven't given over 5,000, pull up a report, get a list, and be able to take action on that. And, James, that's such a great question from the, the chat, you know, the the whole idea of of custom reports. We've got out of the box to get you that initial kind of first level information, and it's gonna be easy for any of the users in your department to access and and utilize. But Yeah. With custom reports, you might wanna have very specific KPIs. So in this dashboard I have pulled up, you know, the KPIs that my fake organization is tracking are probably wildly different from all of you, that are tracking, you know, those meaningful engagements that you mentioned. These dashboards can be built to track exactly that. So I love this ability to, you know, highlight year over year performance. So this widget right here is looking at total number of alumni gifts year over year, and then we have this nice little call out. I mean, we can change everything on these dashboards from the color to the font size to, you know, the the filters that we're placing on the data. So there is a custom dashboard builder, and I would just say this is like a level up from what I showed you before, but available for you to create these very unique versions of the data you want to track and then share this across your organization to all stay on the same page. So I'll I'll slowly scroll here so you can have some eye candy and the types of, visualizations we have available. And, again, this is just scratching the surface. You know, if I can build this, I think anybody on the call can as well. Sure. I can build it. Just click and drag it. Yes. You can. Yeah. Alright. We've got one more thing to show. I'm gonna pop in, to another type of report that, James, you're a little alluding to. You know, pulling data doesn't necessarily always need to be in a report format. Right? It doesn't need to be in that data visualization. You might actually want more of a list. Right? So segmenting is a big part of what everyone on this call does in a day to day, in their day to day work. And I'm gonna show you a tool next that allows you to do just that with similar filters and toggles to get just the information you're looking for. So, you know, as I'm poking around here, James, I just wonder, you know, what types of information would you pull in a list in your prior role? Well, firstly, I always think about, events and who you're gonna invite. Right? Yeah. So you do a lot of events, and you wanna figure out who you're gonna invite. So looking at the criteria, you always wanna include your major donors. So you want those major donors not to be excluded. And even if it was they give to athletics. Right? And even if athletics is doing an acknowledgment and something there, they're a donor to the institution, and that's how they feel. So they need to be included. So we look for all the major donors, and then it depends if it's an event where if we're hosting it on campus or if we're in a different city where we're hosting it. So Love that. And, you know, this tool set allows you to keep refining. So as you were, you know, giving that event example, and and that's certainly what I think about first when I think about lists. You're gonna be able to continue to refine this. So if I'm starting this list, you know, my example here is looking at alumni that have given a gift greater than or equal to $500 within this period of time. Right? I'm I'm continuing to refine the criteria that I'm segmenting. I can actually then share this with you, James, and you can add additional criteria. Right? We can collaborate with this across the team, but we're not having to do that on a printed out Excel document and and pass that around the office. We can actually do that in this digital format, which I know I used to do as a fundraiser a long time ago. Yeah. That is the worst. I also if you wanna talk about how you can exclude, from this list. I love that. So if we've got somebody, let's say Jane here, we know that Jane meets all the criteria, but she has just said, you know what? Like, I'm I'm not I need to take a break from y'all. Right? I'm not available I'm not coming to campus. I'm not able to make it a campus. When you invite me, I feel bad. You. Yeah. Love this. Yes. Pull her up and then remove directly from this list. Again, keeping this digital file of, inclusions and exclusions to make sure we have the exact data that we need. James, I know we're getting up on time here. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen. We've been answering most questions in, the chat here, so I feel pretty good about those. But let's take a look and see what else we can still answer. Hopefully, everybody raised your hand for any additional, conversations you'd like to have to dig in more, but let's take a look. Well, while you're looking, I'm gonna Yeah. Take over and and and chat. A couple of things that, you'll find from Kelly and I and and our peers across the board is we wanna be helpful to you. So whether you're a prospective customer or a current customer, we wanna help. And we wanna help by asking you what your problems are, what your challenges are. So don't feel like you can't you have to reach out to Blackbaud when you're like, I want stewardship management, per example. And then come to us and we go through this. Call your account executive or reach out and say, these are my challenges. This is what I'm having problems with, and we will strategize with you on the best ways that you can handle that. May have technology solutions related to it, may be able to leverage current solutions that you have, etcetera. But we love doing that because we know how difficult it is in your day to day job to do all of the things that you're required to do, let alone doing all this research on the side to find a better way to do something. So just like that Capital One guy, he's passionate about lowering bank fees, which I think is hilarious. We're passionate about helping people do a better job raising money because we did it and we loved it and we love being able to support folks like you. James, I love that as a closing. I'm gonna put our emails up here, and I couldn't echo that more. We, we showed a lot today in a short amount of time, but I hope it was evident that there's a lot of ways to accomplish the goals that you're stretching for. And we wanna help you not only find new ways to approach those workflows, but also you also help you set, bigger goals. Right? We wanna help you exceed your expectations. And, we can, you know, develop those roadmaps based on your needs and and your current pain. So please reach out. Our email addresses are on the screen. My friend Erin is in the chat. I love a former colleague. I have to call her out. I'm sorry. I'm just so excited to see Erin in the chat. But thank you all for joining, and we hope to see you again soon. Thanks, everyone.