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I would like to hear from anyone who has experience with use of both Raiser's Edge and Patron Edge. Our organization has had RE for years and is moving toward PE, and I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has already attempted this or who is moving that way, too. Many thanks!
I have soooo many questions.... First, what type/size of organization are you? Are you integrated with PE & RE? How about FE?
We have been using RE for about 8 years, and recently purchased PE, integrated RE & FE and are hoping to go live with PE in the next 4 weeks. Any advice you can offer would be appreciated.
We are a children's museum, and we have a large membership base in PASS which is being moved to PE, high level members and all donors in RE, and we do high-volume at-the-door ticket sales. The data on our high-level donors in RE has been manicured to within an inch of its life - we are all about Relationships and have those very fully developed, and now we are going to integrate with PE.
What sort of experience has anyone had with overseeing/troubleshooting front-line data entry with the kind of special considerations that come with board members and other high-level constituents? Do the PE/RE change tracking and roll-back capabilities work easily? What is it like to try and find the ONE record you need to change back if you have thousands of entries per day?
How straight-forward is the ability to pull reports and mailing lists based on data from both sides of the sync?
What works best, what doesn't really work, and what was the biggest surprise?
I have MANY more questions, and I'm really hoping to find someone with a similar landscape who has already gone through this, or who is going through it now.
> I'm a consultant working with a zoo with a high volume of memberships
> and visitors per day. We just went live last week on PE. We are not
> integrating to RE until April 2nd ... which we aren't sure why that
> happened. We are very nervous about the integration. The reports are 'ok'
> in PE just not customized as much as RE and you can't do custom
> reports unless you know sql or vba. So, right now we're at a stand
> still with what other reports we need. For example, we can't get a
> itemized receipt to print at our nodes. It just lumps everything
> together. We did find out that PE does NOT share RE Const ID! They
> do have a patch for us to run to match up by ID but it's not what we
> really wanted to hear. When are you going live??
>
We went live with PE two days ago and I'm not sure how it's going. I run the RE side of things and the PE team is so busy I don't yet have an update. I know the person who does reporting is not at all happy about what she has to work with, but is being told she'll like it once it's all done. She's merely hoping to be able to extract what she needs and put it into Access to compile reports. We should Integrate in late Spring or early Summer, and I do not have input on how the data is being migrated into PE - those decisions will all come later. (?)
I know what you mean about "not really what we wanted to hear." I knew about the ID not syncing - apparently Memberships and Relationships are problems, too, among many other things. Every time I ask a question I find out that the sync will either not work the way we thought it would or it will require massive changes in our business practices to accommodate what the sync will do. No one here is nervous about the sync except me and the person who runs PASS/PE - our brass only talks to the BB reps, so they think everything is / will be a peice of cake!
What sort of changes have you needed to make to businesses practices either on the front line or the Development Office/RE side? Is PE working well for your front line staff (ours is worried about slow db response times)? What do you plan to do about reporting? How do you anticipate dealing with front-line data entry issues regarding prime donors and board members? (Our RE data is manicured to within an inch of its life and I fear what a box office person selling tix can do with a prime donor record.) The log of PE to RE changes and the roll-back feature seem pretty cumbersome - how do you anticipate correcting changes that shold not have been made?
I have MANY more questions but I don't want to overload, and I appreciate any feedback or information you or others reading this post may have.
I am the box office manager at a theatre that has been using PE for 2 1/2 years now. We started with PE when the product was brand new and there were lots of things that hadn't been figured out. Blackbaud has done a lot since then to make the product more user friendly, but there is also still a lot that needs to be done.
For your box office staff, PE is the easiest ticketing system to train on and use that I have ever seen. The ticket sales process is a snap.
As far as reporting goes, this is an area that still needs lots of work. Our IT manager has spent a lot of time with support learning the "back end" of PE and is now able to pull information from there, export it to Access and create his own reports. It is not a perfect system and often takes a few tries before we get the numbers we're looking for.
We integrated our systems a year and a half ago and then a few months later had to turn it off because it was causing so many problems. They went back to the drawing board and we integrated again about six months ago. Since then it seems to be working much better. Names and addresses sync between the two systems and donations that are entered into PE show up in RE. There are still a lot of things that the integration does not do, but Blackbaud is aware of these things and has been fixing things with each new release.
We went through a lot the last two years and finally this year (our tickets went on sale in February) I felt like we had the system working in a way that was manageable. I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have and to pass along some of the fun work arounds that I've had to create to get things done.
If anyone needs help with back-end reporting, have a look at my blog: The Patron Edge - Ticketing Software Blog and Forum
I regularly post views and functions that I find useful...
For the interface part of our reporting setup, I am using the Microsoft reporting services. The users of this go through a web interface, and it is far more flexible (and less proprietary) than crystal reports.
The 2005 version has the ability to let users design custom reports for themselves after you set up a ****-report (they call it a "data cube")
Has anyone attempted to create custom Crystal Reports with Patron's Edge?
Jennifer
We just went live with Patron Edge in June. I am very frustrated with the canned reports, and decided to learn crystal. Anyone have any tips for creating custom crystal reports (for a beginner) to be used in PE? I created a test report, added it to the PE reports menu, but can't get it to work. I checked out John's blogspot and it's a little over my head!
Patron Edge 
Report Writing 
Linear Mode
