Name: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud eTapestry (APAC)
Uploaded: 2025-11-18T02:16:04.141Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud eTapestry (APAC)

Transcript for "Product Update Briefing - Blackbaud eTapestry (APAC)": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our November product update briefing for Blackbaud eTapestry. My name is Nick Veladis, and I will be getting us started here today. I, as my my, bottom third there, lower third indicates I actually just moved to Chicago after spending most of my life in Charleston, South Carolina. So I went from the palm trees where that picture was taken with my dog, Marnie, to, just last week experienced, snow in November for the first time in my life. So a bit of a shock to my system. Then that's enough about me. Again, I'll be getting it started, then I'll be passing it over to, my friend and colleague, Jeff Arbuckle, who will, supplement some of the materials I'm sharing. Jeff, a closer neighbor now, than he used to be now that I'm in the Midwest, and he's pictured with his first child there, Stanley, and he'll get a chance to introduce himself, more thoroughly in just a moment. I'm gonna help us get comfortable with a little bit of housekeeping to, kick things off, and then I'll highlight some of the key things that we focus on, within eTapestry as we develop it. We'll then go through some of the features that have been released since the last time we did this, which would have been, in May. And then Jeff is gonna take you through some of the best practices that you may or may not be aware of. Hopefully, some of them you are, but, also, hopefully, it's a lot it will be a bit eye opening that it'll help you better leverage eTapestry than perhaps you are today. And then we'll, before we send you on your way, we'll, reveal some opportunities to learn more and dive a bit deeper. If you if this is your first time joining us, or at least I would say joining us recently, this is our, Goldcast is our our now our webinar platform. So if you are looking at it for the first time, the audio should be coming through your computer speakers. So, hopefully, you are hearing me okay right now. It is going to be audio only, so, no opportunity to speak back to us. If you do want to interact, we hope you will do so through the q and a tab. We have some folks behind the scenes that'll be following up on some of those questions that you may pose, or if you want to comment, it doesn't have to be a question, it can be a comment. Please, do so early and often. We love to hear from you and want it to be interactive as possible and allow your voices to be heard. So, question and comment away throughout the presentation. If you do have anything, please be as specific as possible. Don't just, say, you know, when did this feature come out or something like that. Refer to it by name because there's a chance we'll be following up, not exactly in real time. So if you can be as specific as possible, that'll make sure that we can get back to you as timely as possible. You're gonna see a docs tab up there as well. There you're gonna see several links that are, referenced throughout. So there might be some knowledge based articles, kind of a summary of this presentation, as well as opportunities to get out into the community. So anything that is linked, or, you know, you can't click on the screen, check that docs tab, as well as a recap of this presentation. You can move settings around with the cogwheel at the bottom so you can kinda minimize the slides and stuff, but, honestly, the slides will be the bulk of the presentation. So please have that highlighted, and prominent on your screen. And, yeah, I think that should get us going. If you do experience some glitches or lagging of audio, as silly as it sounds, the best troubleshooting step is to just, refresh your browser. And if, you do get so off base and, you know, you're you're missing the whole thing, fear not. You'll get a recording of this, within twenty four hours of this presentation. So we'll, you'll be able to follow back up on your own time. Having gone through that fun part, here's a little bit more bit of fun, some boiler text, boilerplate text to get us going, but today's presentation may contain forward looking statements that are always subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances. So any forward looking projections do not represent guarantees, and please make any and all business decisions based on features and functionalities that are currently available. Before we do look at what is available, just again wanna highlight our, development things within eTapestry. If you've been to one of these presentations before, this should look a bit familiar, and that is by design. We we aim to be as consistent, as possible over the course of the year, and beyond. So the first thing is to help you stay healthy, secure, and remain compliant. We constantly monitor our software, make updates, and build functionality to ensure your database is secure and running efficiently at all times. Our second theme is to help you nurture relationships with your constituents by releasing features and functionality to help you deliver meaningful dinner experiences, achieve growth, and expand upon your mission. And finally, the third theme is to allow you to benefit from innovation and best practices, and we do that by hopefully providing tools and features that quickly identify opportunities and provide your teams with efficient workflows. So within those themes, let's take a look at some of the features that we've released since we last met in this format, which again would have been in May. We'll take a deeper look at a few of these, but, just starting within your general workflows, you've, hopefully noticed perhaps some just ornamental look and feel changes throughout the application. Hopefully, nothing too disruptive or jarring, but, hopefully, some enhancements that provide a bit more of a modernized look in some areas that's, perhaps easier on the eyes and just better to navigate in general. We've made it possible to look back at your login history, which I'll show you how to do in just a moment. And we've also added the ability to link duplicate accounts directly from the duplicate re report itself, which is handy. No longer will have to navigate away from the report, to the account itself in order to link your duplicates. So we'll have more on that in a moment, and I know Jeff is gonna touch a bit more on duplicate reporting in general as well. With your new reports, we've updated the column fields to help you more e e easily distinguish between accounts and journal entries. So we're used to see, just last modified by. You'll now see a column for account last modified by as well as journal entry last modified by. So, hopefully, when you're looking at a large portion of your database, and looking to filter segment, these extra columns will just make that a bit easier on you, and that is worth noting that this only replies to new reports. So if you frequently look at a report that was previously created, it will have not changed. The columns will only be found in new reports only. And then lastly, add your personas. I hope you haven't, in the past lost too much time by navigating away from a persona without saving changes. I can imagine the frustration that would cause having done that, not just when I'm working with any tapestry, but Microsoft solutions and everything. You hate unsafe changes. But fear not. We've now added an alert that should prevent, or at least warn you before you navigate away from a persona, with any unsafe changes. So, hopefully, that can save some headaches and and prevent, data loss in the future. And, you now also have the ability to add multiple sticky notes onto a record, which I will talk to more in just a moment. So as I mentioned, several, small look and feel enhancements throughout the application, but most notable is probably right when you log in. You can now quickly access important resources such as, eTapestry mobile, your online invoice payments, eTapestry training, the what's new section of eTapestry as well as direct contacts to support. So all that right at your fingertips right when you log in, hopefully save you time or at the very least a few clicks. If you know exactly what you're looking for, we've surfaced that right at login. Next up, to improve upon your user security, you can now review your recent login history. You do that, just from the settings menu in the top right corner, and then you can select my recent login history. From that login history page, you can then view those login times and durations from your accounts within the last thirty days. So, if you ever need to, whatever reason, complete, like, an activity audit or, better understand when some changes were made within the database, you can now easily find that right within the system. Next up, I talked about the sticky notes. So now you can add multiple sticky notes to a record. This was, surfaced by you all through our idea bank, so we're happy and pleased to deliver this one to you. But these are, you know, particularly helpful if you want to draw attention to a record, anytime someone looks at it. So for instance, instance, one of your supporters has a particularly special relationship with your organization, you can highlight that and say, you know, do not reach out to this person without contacting, you know, so and so. Whoever within your organization manages that relationship, you want them to be the the lead point on it, you can make sure that you don't have people, kind of doubling up your communications and and talking over each other by reaching out to someone that, prefers to be contacted a certain way. So, hopefully, that helps you kinda maximize your relationships, and you're using those already today. If you are, you now have the option to add multiple. And if you don't use them or you don't want to add a second one, you can still use the note field, and just not specify a sticky note type, and that will still allow you to use your notes in an unchanged way. So, hopefully, that's helpful to you. I do have one more here to go through, and I'm not gonna speak too much because, again, I know Jeff is gonna double down on this. But since it is new, I just wanna call out that, again, you can now link your accounts directly from the report without navigating it away. So, from reports, you get your standard reports, select the duplicate report under your account reports. And then once you run the report, you'll see the option to link the accounts, right there within the report. So like the one the example you have on your screen there, that is not an actual duplicate. That is most likely a household, so you want to just link them as being, in their relationship. And then once you run that report in the future, they will no longer show up as duplicates because you have them linked yet being individual records. You're not merging. You're not deleting. You're just linking them as a relationship, which hopefully that's very helpful now that you can do that within the report itself and not have to navigate away to the constituent records themselves. So that is the recently released, portion of this presentation. So I'm now gonna pass it over to Jeff who's gonna talk a little bit more about those features, not just those ones, but tips and tricks in general. So, without further ado, Jeff Arbuckle. Thank you, Nick. And, hello, everybody. Jeff Arbuckle here coming to you from Beech Grove, Indiana. It's a little tiny town inside of Indianapolis. Nick, having moved to, Chicago, Chicago is one of my favorite destinations to go to for various comic book conventions and so forth. I was actually just up there, twice over the last few months. So, but, no, happy to talk to everybody here about some tips and tricks and some things that I like to highlight. One of the things that, most of you who are probably listening know who I am from attending some various webinars and things like that that I, put on usually on a monthly basis. Being that we're here at the end of the year, I don't have more, topics scheduled until February, but we'll make sure to get that link into that doc section where you can find it so you can be able to, register for those when they get, posted, likely towards the end of the year or possibly at the start of the year in January. But I am definitely, somebody who likes to talk about the various little things as well as some of the bigger things, but little things that can help people get a little bit more out of their eTapestry. And what I really want to highlight this time around are a couple of eTapestry standard reports. Now the standard reports are a specialized category within eTapestry, within the report section that are what we call canned reports. Meaning, unlike the other customized reports that you can put together where you specifically select which, fields you want to see in the various columns, which you would then later match with one of your queries of raw data to see exactly what you want. The standard reports come prepackaged. So everybody should have these reports available to you inside of eTapestry, And everybody should be able to pretty much use the same query base all constituents, just the very generic all constituents query to be able to get some really good information. And what the standard reports are really good at are giving you a lot of opportunity to see and analyze information in your database. Now you can get account reports, you can get giving analytics, you can get email reports from when you send advance mass emails, and there are more things that are available there. But I really wanna highlight a few that are really kind of key at various points of the year that you might want to run. And being that we're at the end of a year, this might be something that you might want to take into consideration to get a good idea of, one, what are some of those duplicate accounts. So we talked we've already briefly touched upon the duplicates, but also some other analytical information that are good for you as well. So the first two that I'm really going to highlight more heavily are going to be your duplicate report and what we call the donor cash projection report. Now when would these reports be very handy for you? Well, one, the duplicate report's always something that I would recommend that you run probably quarterly, just to make sure that any online donations, anything that's being added by any other users that aren't you, are being, looked at and make sure that you are not, running into duplicate accounts when you are preparing any kind of mailings or anything like that. The donor cash projection report is an excellent tool to be able to look ahead. Now what it won't necessarily do is it won't necessarily look ahead at individual giving. So like, you know, when somebody makes an online donation or sends you a check. But what this can do is if you traffic in things like recurring gift schedules and pledge schedules, the donor cash projection report can look ahead. And I'll show you how that basically looks at that information. So they can kinda give you some idea of what to expect to bring in. But first, with the duplicate report, when you click to run the duplicate report, again, you can just simply use your base all constituents query. And when you run the report, it, it it finds all of the possible duplicates based on the usual possible duplicate. I I guess it's the, I don't know exactly what that would be called, but the it would analyze it based on three different fields. One, the account's name. Two, the account's address. And three, the email address that is that is tied to that, tied to that account. So though that kind of schematics are are how we look and see, okay, are these two people possible duplicates? Now here we have John Smith. John Smith has two different addresses. Maybe he just recently moved and then he made an online donation and now you have two different John Smiths. Now one of the things that I did cut off on this screenshot is that he does have the same email address. So the account name and the email address basically identified these as a possible duplicate. So you can review these based on the information returned just straight from your screen, and you can work from that screen right there where you can merge two accounts to into one singular account. Thus, basically, just filling in anything blank or, updating any information as you go along. You can link those accounts as, Nick had had previously stated. Right here, you can click link those accounts and it would take you to a relationship page where you can then say, okay. Well, maybe this isn't John Smith, but it is Mary Smith. So John and Mary have the same address and the same email address, but they have two different names based on how they've been entered in or how you receive their donation. You can now make them a husband and wife. They're no they're not duplicates, but they are to be related as spouses. You can now click that link these accounts from this screen. And then you can also say, nope. As as unlikely as it is that we have two John Smiths at the same address, maybe it's actually John Smith senior and junior. These are not duplicate accounts, and it just basically removes them from being being, flagged again as duplicates. But one of the great things about the duplicate report, especially if you haven't run it either ever before or haven't run it in a long time, you do not have to sit there and do something with every single possible duplicate. You can always leave that report and come back and it will have this little blue, message that will say, you know, you previously ran this report. Do you want to access this again to be able to continue working on these duplicates? So I definitely recommend, if you haven't already been doing this at least quarterly, I would recommend running the duplicate report against your all constituents account and or your all constituent query rather. And check those duplicate accounts, regularly because that really will help you from running into any of those types of situations that are unfortunate where you run a bunch of, you know, run a list for a mailing and now you've got multiple John Smiths, you have multiple Mary Adams, or whatever the case may be. And now you are spending a little bit more on those mailings for people who may have just simply changed their address or or recently moved. Now when I talk about the, the donor cash projection report, when you click on that, again, you can use the base all constituents. What this does is it looks at either pledge reports or I'm sorry. Pledge schedules or recurring gift schedules, and it then says, okay. Well, over the next five years, what do you expect to receive from these schedules? If if they are, you know, like, especially if you have, like, a pledge schedule that has enough scheduled out beyond that five years or within that five years, it will show you, oh, well, John Smith will have these payments that are due in these years, and this is what you can expect from him. From me, for example, I have a recurring gift schedule set up so you can see, okay, well, if he gives $50 a month every month nonstop through this time frame, we can expect to see $600 come in from Jeff Arbuckle. And this is a really great way to look ahead to the future and say, well, we know that we can get whatever, you know, come in through our online, donation form or from our various appeals. But what can we kind of expect and depend on from these recurring gift schedules and these pledge, schedules? These are a great way to be able to kind of basically analyze what's coming up. And it's a great way to be able to really kind of get a good idea of what to expect, to come in from your various donors who have these schedules already set up in the database. Now there are other settings that are available in this report where you can change what the date that it is comparing to or where it's starting from. So you could potentially say, well, based on the first day of next year or something like that. But if you base it as of today's date, it will say, okay. Here's what you can expect for the rest of this year and then the next four years beyond that. So these are two reports that I say, you know, one, definitely run as often as you can. The per the cash projection report, I think this one is something that you can certainly run, like, maybe in your fourth quarter when you're kind of looking ahead as to what to expect, to to basically come in so you can have some idea of what your budget would at least be able to say, we can definitely count on this money from these donors. But something I definitely recommend that you take a look at. Now something else that I definitely recommend that you take a look at, at least a couple of times through the year, maybe midyear and towards the end of the year, like, you know, October, November, is what I call the giving dynamics report. Now this is part of a special group of reports called executive reports, and these can get very analytical. Again, you can use this based on, the base category query all constituents. And what this does is it looks at two different time frames. These do not need to be full years or fiscal years, but any two time frames that you wanna look at. I know I've known people in the past to say I wanna look at the first half of the year versus the second half of the year. And what that can then do is it analyzes this information to say, okay. Well, who's a new donor? Who's a donor that gave before the first time frame, didn't give in that first time frame, and gave again in the second time frame? That means we recaptured them. Where you know, who are the people who upgraded, gave more the second time frame versus the first? There's also a way to look at the people who gave the exact same amount between the two different time frames, who downgraded. Those are the folks who gave less than, you know, the gave less in the second time frame than they did the first time frame. So these are all various, categories of these donors that you can drill into. You can save those lists as, custom account queries that you can then go out and say, okay. Well, these are people who might be lapsing. They haven't given in the second time frame compared to the first. We need to maybe send out a mailing to them or reach out to them via the phone or or email. These are people who gave less this time frame compared to the previous one. We need to reach out to those folks. So this is a great analytical tool to maybe find some folks that you can reach out to as you get to your end of your push to be able to do a little bit more with those groups of people. So these are just a few reports that I wanted to highlight that I definitely recommend everybody at least play around with and and, run a couple of times a year or a couple of times throughout the course of their time with etapsture just to kinda see does this information, particularly when it comes to some of these executive reports and especially my favorite report, the Giving Dynamics report, would this be something that would be handy for us to be able to use to help us maybe raise a little bit more money as we kinda get down to the second half of the year or to the last quarter of the year and so forth. But like I said, you know, you know, I always welcome people to come to my webinars. You know, once we get into the new year starting in February, I have a whole bunch of webinars planned for the rest of the year. We will have that link for you in the docs on where you can go and sign up for that. And, we can always make sure that, you are getting the most out of your eTapestry, and that's that's what I like to do. So with that, I am going to kick things back over to Nick, and he can talk about more opportunities to learn more. Yes. Thank you, Jeff, and, thanks especially to all of you for giving us a few moments of your busy schedules today. Before we do let you go, again, just a few opportunities to perhaps learn a bit more and and better leverage the way you're using eTapestry. First, eTapestry, as I'm sure you know by now, does integrate with, both payment services and JustGiving for peer to peer fundraising. And both of those solutions, have their independent product update briefings as well. Always, sorta ever changing, in the payment services world. So always stay up to date on how payments are processed and what some of your options are there. A couple of different viewing options based on where in the world you're viewing from and, as well as with just giving it the advertised times do not work. Go ahead and sign up anyways. You'll get a link to watch the on demand recording at your convenience, and, these links will be in that docs tab as well. And finally, if you're not already, please please take part in our eTapestry community. We're always excited to, hear you all, sort of network amongst yourselves and and, you know, kinda cross cross reference and sometimes, come up with new ideas for for fundraising ideas and events, while also helping each other, solve problems as well. And it's also a great time, to get our attention as well. We are always looking at the communities and and making sure that, the discussions are being responded to and and all of that as well as the idea bank. As I mentioned earlier, the sticky notes came directly from the idea bank. It was a request, that was put into the idea bank, and and we executed on it and got it out. So please do drop your ideas into there, as well as anything. You know, it don't have to be super eTap Street specific, just anything about fundraising challenges and, constituent engagement, etcetera, anything that your organization may be facing, chances are it's not unique. We know a lot of, a lot of you guys have have the same struggles and and champion them, champion those struggles in in unique ways. So share your share your successes and, voice your challenges as well. You we, as well as your peers, are listening, so please take part in the eTapestry community. And with that, we will let you go on behalf of Jeff Arbuckle and my other colleagues at Blackbaud that, work with any tapestry. We say thank you again for your time. And to quote, something I've heard Jeff say several times now is keep e tapping on, and we will talk to you soon. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day.