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I could probably just send an email to Drew, but I don't know if anyone else would be interested in this...
What exactly is TIE and what does it provide for? Is it similiar to CR server where you can store documents and reports for others to see, or does it go beyond that? And is there anything particularly special about it that makes it worth while?
Thanks!
Doug
__________________ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Doug Creek
RE Database Administrator
University of Alaska Foundation sndgc@email.alaska.edu
The Information Edge provides a holistic view of constituent, financial, and program activities so you can better monitor mission performance and easily share insights at all levels of the organization.
The Information Edge is tightly integrated with The Raiser's Edge and The Financial Edge. Plus, its Universal Source Connector can draw data from anywhere in your organization, in any format. Its dashboards can combine information from multiple sources (i.e., fundraising, programs, marketing, events, financial) and present Key Mission Performance Indicators (KMPIs) so managers can monitor and track performance across the organization.
Performance Dashboards
Empower your staff to manage, track, and analyze key mission performance information, so you can monitor the overall health of your organization
Advanced Reporting and Analysis
Transform static reports and rogue spreadsheets into interactive reports that enable users at all levels to perform their own in-depth analysis
Marketing Segmentation
Uncover the characteristics that drive meaningful direct marketing segments for improved response rates and a better return on every marketing dollar spent
Financial Analysis
Comply with complex accounting standards, simplify your budget creation process, and ease accountability measures
I could probably just send an email to Drew, but I don't know if anyone else would be interested in this...
What exactly is TIE and what does it provide for? Is it similiar to CR server where you can store documents and reports for others to see, or does it go beyond that? And is there anything particularly special about it that makes it worth while?
The Information Edge is BB's data warehousing and data mining application. As with all BI applications, reports tend to run much quicker, because totals are pre-calculated.
Essentially, what you do is write a bunch of DTS scripts to transform and flatten your OLTP data. From there, you can use these flattened tables to run reports or create cubes.
As Pete mentioned, you can pull in data from any source. We are having our data screened by WealthEngine. We're able to pull this information into TIE and connect to the data that we've pulled from Raiser's Edge and report on the combined data. (Okay, we can't do this automatically yet, because the WealthEngine database is on a Novell server and the process that runs the nightly refresh doesn't have access to that directory, because it's not authenticated to the Novell server.)
We've talked about pulling in data from our GL system (not FE), so that we can run reports on our endowed funds for the principle donors to those funds.
The two other things that I really like are Smart Fields (calculated columns) and Monitored Fields. Monitored Fields basically keeps track of whenever a field changes. It records the date of the change, the old value, and the new value. This makes it much simpler to run many reports. You simply look up the value for the particular field at a particular time rather than trying to calculate the value based on start dates, end dates, and/or create dates and you don't have to worry about deleted records, either.
And, here is the thing that I really like. You can use Crystal to report directly off the database using the ODBC connection!!!!
I really feel that I've only begun to scratch the surface of what I can do with it. It is a very powerful tool, because you are writing your own SQL code to build the tables and the cubes. If you know how to do it in SQL, you CAN do it in TIE, too.
Drew
__________________ J. Drew Allen
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Crystal Reports and SQL Server Consultant
It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
Umm, you don't need TIE to do that... I don't have TIE or datawriter... I just manually setup the ODBC connection and use crystal...
Other then a few bells and whistles, it doesn't sound like I can do much more then I can with just crystal...
Well, of course, but with TIE, unlike RE, you can do this from the front-end. For me, this makes it easier to push out Crystal Reports, because we don't have Crystal Reports server.
I think that it is more than a few bells and whistles. As I said, I think that I've only begun to scratch the surface of what it can do, so I don't think that my description is really doing it justice.
Drew
__________________ J. Drew Allen
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Crystal Reports and SQL Server Consultant
It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
We use TIE and like Drew said, it really does an awful lot more than the Crystal Reports program which comes bundled with RE. TIE is a data warehouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse.
Having TIE allows you to choose how you want to store the data which in turn has implications for the ease and speed of creating reports or anything else you may want to do with a data warehouse. For example, we have things which we sell as well as people who donate to us. With TIE we could have our gifts table with only the donations in it but also have a new table which does not exist in RE called orders or purchases which would pull only the relevant "gifts" from RE.
You may also be like a lot of organisation and store information which doesn’t fit elsewhere as attributes. You could opt for these to be brought into TIE and put as a field on the constituent, gift, action, appeal, etc table.
The biggest benefit to us from using TIE is our lifecycles. We have a lifecycle for each major business unit the charity has. We have a cash donor lifecycle, a major donor lifecycle, an insurance lifecycle for people who have bought out insurance products, a home shopping lifecycle for people who have bought from our catalogue or online store, etc. We have about 60-70 of these different lifecycles and within each lifecycle someone could be active, lapsing, lapsed, enquirer, lapsed enquirer, prospect, lapsed prospect, etc.
These can be implemented by creating one of these smart fields which Drew was talking about or better yet they can be created as a separate table which will be more future proof if you are going to have more than a handful. This is really useful for slicing and dicing our supporter base and we save a lot of time by having all of these pre-calculated. The usefulness of lifecycles is enormous and drives all of our analysis and selections.
I sound like a salesman so I should point out that in order to get the most out of TIE will either take a lot of investment in training for your staff. You would need to know quite a lot about SQL and preferably SQL 2005's SSIS or you would need to pay BB a lot of money to keep updating it whenever you need a change made.
Well friends, I just started my own business, I have a little money but not that much as I need. I need around $50,000 to move into the big times, but with out that lump sum I want be able to tackle the big jobs like the competition. I bought that book with the guy with all the question marks its ok as far as telling you who to write, but it doesn't tell you how to go about getting the grants. Can anyone please give a little idea?
Well friends, I just started my own business, I have a little money but not that much as I need. I need around $50,000 to move into the big times, but with out that lump sum I want be able to tackle the big jobs like the competition. I bought that book with the guy with all the question marks its ok as far as telling you who to write, but it doesn't tell you how to go about getting the grants. Can anyone please give a little idea?
I think you posted this in the wrong forum and wrong thread. This thread is about The Information Edge product from Blackbaud. It has nothing to do with getting grants.
Good luck though!
__________________ Brian A. Zive
Assistant Director, Systems
Business Intelligence Analyst
Massachusetts General Hospital
Development Office
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