[nisaac]

I'm in the process of arranging a User Group meeting in the Philadelphia area. I'm wondering if any of you are interested in attending. If so, would March, April or May work better for you? The meeting would take place in Horsham, PA, a suburb of Philly. If you respond, please let me know what you would like to get from a user group meeting - objectives, ideas, etc.

Thanks so much,

Nora

[DrewAllen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nisaac

I'm in the process of arranging a User Group meeting in the Philadelphia area. I'm wondering if any of you are interested in attending. If so, would March, April or May work better for you? The meeting would take place in Horsham, PA, a suburb of Philly. If you respond, please let me know what you would like to get from a user group meeting - objectives, ideas, etc.

Put me down! I'm sure that some of my co-workers would also be interested.

Please, not March. It's already a very busy month for me.

I'm mainly interested in meeting other Philly area users.

Drew

[nisaac]

Sounds good. You're on my list. I'm leaning toward May. We still get some bad weather in March. April is another option. I'll keep you informed.

[DebraGross]

Hi Nora,

Count me in, too! May works great for me.

Debbie

[Cat Lee]

Nora,
I would pick May but only because the NTEN conference is in April. I would like to discuss BBNC and database administrative roles in general.

I'd be interested in a User group for our area. Keep me informed, please!

[nisaac]

I just found out there is a User Group meeting in Philly on 4/23. Go to the Blackbaud User Group Page to register.

[Cat Lee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nisaac

I just found out there is a User Group meeting in Philly on 4/23. Go to the Blackbaud User Group Page to register.

The Baltimore User Group is scheduled for the same day. I am attending that one as it is closer to home. Several of us are trying to get the DC User Group restarted. There is a separate thread for that one if anyone is interested.

[nisaac]

We're on for the Philly Users Group tomorrow. I'll report back to the group from my viewpoint on any info that might be of interest.

[jas.]

any reports on how this went? i really wanted to attend and meet some folks, but we had a new employee starting that day and i had to be there to show her the ropes.

[nisaac]

I attended the user group. I enjoyed meeting the other RE users. The presentations were targeted toward BBNC. I didn't mingle as much as I should have as I was tired that day. I'd like another user group meeting where we have more breakout sessions maybe targeted to user's issues.

[Peter Gulka]

I hope you plugged the Blackbus site

[DrewAllen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jas.

any reports on how this went? i really wanted to attend and meet some folks, but we had a new employee starting that day and i had to be there to show her the ropes.

It was pretty much what I expected, but better. Of course, that wasn't hard, because my expectations were pretty low. I had trouble keeping my mouth shut especially when it was clear that Blackbaud didn't understand the repercussions of what they were recommending.

For instance, the woman from Blackbaud said that you shouldn't set up new campaigns every fiscal year and that if you needed to track yearly goals you should create new funds every fiscal year. This is just wrong on so many counts, first and foremost being that we have to interface with our Finance Office, so our fund structure needs to reflect their fund structure. We have over 800 funds, and we simply cannot create 800+ new funds every year.

I did find that the break-outs by job title were much more helpful than the break-outs by organization type. We had sent mostly techy people to this, but the PA Hospital had sent mostly Events people. They had questions about Events that we just couldn't answer, and they couldn't answer our questions either.

On the whole, I think it was worthwhile. It's too bad that you had to miss it.

Drew

[jas.]

well, let's have another one then!

thanks for the report. the new employee was the dev services coordinator--the job I mentioned here back in December or January--so with any luck we'll both be attending the next one, whenever it is.