Thank you, Amy, for checking back. Some of those initial bugs have been worked out and the basics (donation form, simple registration form) are running smoothly now, but we have so many tools we have not yet had time to touch. We are a small staff, limited budget, so it is a "get to as we can" thing. I will share lessons learned though that others might benefit from:
1. Don't sign a contract to have Blackbaud do any custom coding for your site until after you have had the productu up and running for awhile. We included some custom code work where they were going to replicate an interactive page from our old site as part of our initial purchase package. We did not understand the wording of the contract well enough to see that they planned to replicate only part of the page functionality; had we known the product then the way we do now, we would have caught this.
2. If Raiser's Edge is stored on your own servers rather than on the cloud, allow extra time before things are up and running smoothly. We had issues ranging from security certificate problems to extreme slowness that related to the "bouncing" back and forth between their server and ours - finally resolved but it took trial and error.
3. In order to log in to our new Blackbaud Merchant Services account we had to upgrade to IE 8; but when we upgraded to IE 8 our Net Community Web pages stopped loading. Finally our own IT team figured out that it was the "floating" social media icons in Net Community that were causing the problem; once we removed those it worked fine. Very strange; but for those implementing, be forewarned.
4. When we decided to purchase Net Comm it was largely because we wanted to be able to customize forms and registrations. This has perhaps been the biggest disspointment of all - one cannot customize as expected. Net Comm is fine for basic registrations and donations and the convenience of these flowing straight into RE; but don't have visions of sugar plums dancing in your head; The donation form and registration form parts themselves are very generic and there isn't a thing you can do about it without paying extra. We also purchased Sphere; Sphere has the customizable featurs I expected Net Community to have. We would probably use Sphere more than we do if it weren't for the hefty 8% surcharge they add to the 3% credit card fee.
5. The basic package does not include the piece needed to sell any merchandise. Since it came with a shopping cart transaction part (transaction part 2 I believe) we thought we could, but no, thats ANOTHER part you have to buy extra. Again, buyer beware.
6. One really has to analyze whether their shop is large enough to need the automatic flow between Raiser's Edge and their website, or if one can simply use something like Importomatic to automate loading their data into Raiser's Edge and thus have their choice of any one of a wide range of CMS products that are out there.
Hopefully some of our hard earned lessons can ease the way for someone else!
