We are a group of users of Blackbaud products and are not affiliated with Blackbaud. We'd love to have you join our community to help and be helped in getting the most from your Blackbaud software.
Register now to join us to get independant advice on your system, connect with 3rd party consultants to help you maximize your database and have a real alternative to the official Blackbaud website.
We are considering the Blackbaud Direct Marketing Software. I would love to hear from anyone who is currently using the software. If I remember correctly, BB told me that this product is a spin off of The Information Edge and was released Jan 2007. They told me that there are 10 clients who have it up and running.
Our annual fund folks spend so much time on mailing segments and the updates for the assigned appeal codes. This product will help manage and segment all mailings, appeals, campaigns and giving programs and the end-users won't need me to run it for them.
We aren't considering adding another module at the moment but we are considering bringing Heller Consulting in to help us with moves management and possibly direct mail. On their website they publish instructions on how to segment using the package/appeals feature in RE. Currently I am doing it by hand with queries, export and then an excel spreadsheet that I sort, segment and count manually. It takes forever. I plan to follow their instructions and see if it is more efficient.
My questions are the following: Would anyone that worked with Heller Consulting like to share their experience? Does anyone out there have a more automated way to do the segmenting in Raiser's Edge, both setting up the segments and strings for mail merge and also tracking the gift response.
The appeals analysis cannned report in RE works well to get statistical data, my problem is in the comparison part, tracking & counting the response for the mailed to segments. For example in each specific giving level group I mailed to x number of people, y number responded with gifts of z, and t, and o, etc. Of those individuals in those subgroups x number gave 2+ gifts, x number have only given 1 gift in their history. Additionally y number are family members, z number aren't. There's got to be a better way to sort and count this detail than in excel and I'd love to hear from someone who has found it. Thanks for your help. Judy
__________________ Judy Brockmeyer Manager, Operations & Stewardship Jewish Home Development Department 302 Silver Ave. San Francisco, CA 94112 JBrockmeyer@JHSF.org
All I can tell you is: I worked with Heller with: Sandy and Marcelo to be exact and they were helpful; they explained everything in plain english - no "tech" talk; and with everything that they help you with they give you detailed documentation to easily insert into a Policy and Procedures Manual...and that is what i'm currently working on, not that it will get done anytime soon.
I have no complaints at all and they make themselves available and I still bug Marcelo on occasion - and we were done in October!
__________________ Kitri Steigerwald Donor Relations Specialist American Dental Association Foundation Chicago, IL www.adafoundation.org
I am not familiar with how Heller has it described on their website but you can do this using mail Quick letters.
You create a query for each group you want to mail to.
You enter them in heirarchical order on the segment tab (if someone is in 2 groups they will go into the first one not the second one)
You use quick letters to assign the appeal and package.
You can then either use the data file created from quick letters for your mailing or you can query on assigned appeals to export a data file.
We are considering the Blackbaud Direct Marketing Software. I would love to hear from anyone who is currently using the software. If I remember correctly, Blackbaud told me that this product is a spin off of The Information Edge and was released Jan 2007. They told me that there are 10 clients who have it up and running.
Our annual fund folks spend so much time on mailing segments and the updates for the assigned appeal codes. This product will help manage and segment all mailings, appeals, campaigns and giving programs and the end-users won't need me to run it for them.
Jeff
Any idea if this is going to replace TIE? I'm wondering what it means that it's a "spin-off"?? How different are the 2 products?
Blackbaud Directing Marketing vs The Information Edge
I was told that The Information Edge was trying to be too many things for too many user types. It was not easy enough for non-techie types to use. They never mentioned what if anything had happened with TIE.
I reviewed one of the PDF help files for BBDM and if this product does what it sets out to, and is not still on the bleeding edge, it looks like a great product.
Any idea if this is going to replace TIE? I'm wondering what it means that it's a "spin-off"?? How different are the 2 products?
They say it's not going to replace TIE but they will be phasing out TIE and phasing in BBDM so make of that what you will...
We saw a demo recently and our TIE user mainly had issues with creating smart fields and writing back - i don't use TIE so can't say exactly what all that means but basically these were big issues that he thought he would have a big problem with if BBDM didn't allow for these.
Otherwise, it looks quite good and we may become guinea pigs.
Direct Mail 
Linear Mode
