GoRaise Mobile Review

I recently had the opportunity to preview Electric Plum’s GoRaise Mobile application.  Electric Plum was founded in 2011 by Shaun Sullivan, the former CTO of Blackbaud.  GoRaise Mobile provides a simple, intuitive mobile interface for The Raiser’s Edge® (RE).  Those of you who are familiar with Shaun know his passion for all things mobile, so it’s no surprise that his first consumer product is a mobile interface for the software he shepherded for more than 20 years.

In general, mobile functionality for RE feels a little like a no-brainer, and some on our team were wondering why this wasn’t available through Blackbaud sooner.  Well, here it is, so let’s take a look.

Out of the Shadows: The danger of shadow databases and the 3 keys to eliminating them

Imagine this scenario:
An important donor calls your organization asking why she did not receive her invitation to the annual VIP luncheon. After further investigation, you confirm that she was indeed on the list, but that the invitation went to the wrong address. “But I’ve given you my new address several times already!” she says.

The culprit might be a “shadow system.” Your shadow system may be an Excel spreadsheet, an Outlook contact, or last year’s VIP luncheon mailing list sitting on your fundraiser’s desktop, used again this year.

Shadow systems can be a serious problem in any organization, because manually updating and synchronizing information between your CRM system or donor database (the primary system of record) and these extra lists is time-consuming and often overlooked. You end up with old, incorrect data somewhere – either in the shadow systems, or in your donor database.

There are three keys to helping staff give up their extra lists:

Why Projects Fail, Part 1

At JCA, we do project work for nonprofit organizations.  We’ve been doing it for more than 20 years for hundreds of nonprofit organizations.  I’ve been doing this work personally with JCA for the last 11 years.  I’ve been involved in a lot of projects, both as a participant and a leader.  I’ve seen success and I’ve seen failure (is that a James Taylor song?).  Every project teaches me something about how to make them succeed, but I must admit, I’ve learned more from the failures than from the successes.  As our COO Steve Birnbaum says, “A barrel of ‘attaboys!’ don’t add up to one ’aw crap.’”

Talking about why projects fail is nothing new.  There are many articles and blogs on the topic, most of which say the same basic thing, and I encourage you to read them.  Most of them are right, and I may repeat a few of those things here.  My goal is to share with you, over the course of this three-part series, what I’ve learned running projects at nonprofits across the country.  There are so many reasons a project might fail, and it’s never the same one for all, but here are some things to think about.