Hi everyone. Just a reminder that all of us Blogbaudians have picked up and moved into new digs over at blogs.blackbaud.com. Come by and see us!

Product Blogs

• The User’s Edge — The official blog of The Raiser’s Edge
• The Ledger — The official blog of The Financial Edge
• The Spotlight — The official blog of The Patron Edge
• The Book Bag — Blackbaud’s school software blog

Personal Blogs

• Connections — Steve MacLaughlin, Director of Internet Solutions
• Navigating the Fundraising Universe — Jim Bush, Enterprise Bus. Architect
• Webby Things — Chad Norman, Manager of Internet Marketing

Corporate Blogs

• From the Doc Side — The Product Documentation Team Blog
• Blackbaud News — Up-to-date Blackbaud News

Industry Blogs

• NetWits — Internet marketing, communication, tools, and technology

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As part of our upgraded online community, some new blogs are coming to life over at Blackbaud.com:

The User’s Edge: The Official Blog of the Raiser’s Edge
The Ledger: The Official Blog of The Financial Edge
The Spotlight: The Official Blog of The Patron Edge

There are also a couple of personal blogs: Steve MacLaughlin’s Connections and my own Webby Things. The infamous Jim Bush is next, along with a few more brave souls we’re coaxing out of the ‘baud. Stay tuned for more, or just subscribe to Blackbaud Blogs (rss) and let us come to you.

I was intrigued by this recent article about SAP and others incorporating collaboration features like wikis, forums, blogs and widgets into their products to help encourage communication among users. One of our main goals with products on the Infinity platform is to get beyond the idea of these apps being a ‘data storage’ tool and really focus on the ways in which the products facilitate and improve business processes. We’re already well on our way to meeting this goal through features like customizable, easy-to-use business transactions (such as sending receipts or posting to GL), and better integration of reporting data into these functions.

But a huge part of facilitating processes involves communication among people and departments. I’m wondering what we can do to better allow users to communicate with each other through our products? And where would this type of functionality be most useful? We’ve already taken steps in this direction in specific areas - Major Giving cultivation, for example, where we’re looking to improve the ability of fundraisers and their managers to communicate progress and status on their prospects. But I think this is an area we can explore further and really take advantage of some of the newer tools available to us.

It seems like there are some key characteristics of situations where in-product collaboration would be most useful:

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[Jim enters blog and steps up on soapbox]. How dare you treat my $25 donation as such an insignificant drop in the bucket. I could have had a decent meal, bought a new shirt, gone to a couple of movies. Or, better yet, I could have given this money to an organization that cares and appreciates my support of their mission! [Jim steps down off of his soapbox]

Here’s the story. Over the past several months I have made small gifts ($25) to a number of CLIENT organizations that I worked with during the same period. To be exact, I made 10 gifts of $25 each: seven made online, two sent by mail, and one handed to someone at the organization while I was onsite. These gifts represented my first donations to these particular organizations, and were undesignated so that the money could be used where it was most needed.

So far, so good, right? Here is where it gets interesting. Take a guess at how many acknowledgments I received for the 10 gifts I made. It’s less than half – actually, it’s way less than half. TWO! Two thank yous out of 10 gifts made! One from an online gift, and one from a mailed gift. And, yes, every organization had my mailing address and I did not indicate anywhere that I did not want to be acknowledged for my gift. Don’t blame this on me!

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One of our usability engineers recently received some negative feedback around constituent records in Infinity. Unlike previous Blackbaud applications where records open in a new window, constituent records in Infinity open in the main window. So to leave the record, you don’t “close” anything, you just navigate away, like you would from a Web page. A couple of users had some trouble adjusting to this new approach.

These were existing RE users, so our hope is that they were just reacting to a change in the pattern they’ve grown accustomed to. But “they’ll get used to it” always makes designers really uneasy. Will they? How can we be sure this was an issue of familiarity and not a fundamental design flaw?

We’ll continue to test this issue with both RE and non-RE users, but I think this highlights the reality of user feedback and decision making in the design process. User input is one of several tools designers have at their disposal to help make the tough decisions, including design patterns, design principles, usability heuristics and personal experience. All of these are invaluable resources for informing the design process, but rarely do they make design decisions crystal clear. They are all very open to interpretation. In the end, it is still up to individual decision makers to make the “right” call based on the information they have.

For this reason, the real power in user-centered design comes not from a few usability tests and design heuristics, but from the development of a culture that puts a priority on user experience and encourages an ongoing, iterative process of feedback and refinement. This process doesn’t end when a product is released - existing features should be constantly re-evaluated and every new customer treated as another opportunity to evaluate your design decisions. Through these ‘layers,’ the experience becomes more and more refined:

When your decision makers are making user-informed, skillful design decisions, the difference between these levels are minimized. The process is then allowed to focus primarily on adding efficiency and smoothing out rough edges while functionality is gradually expanded. And when changes are required, this isn’t seen as a failure, but as a natural part of the design process.

Friday I was walking through the Product Development department when the Director of Core Technologies, Paul Gibson, waved me into a developer’s cube. I could tell by the look on their faces that they had something cool to show me. They sure did.

Paul Crowder (the dev) has been working on implementing platform-level support for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in our upcoming Infinity application platform. KPIs will be featured throughout future applications built on the platform (Galileo, RE8, Bullseye etc.) Apologies for all the code names, we’ll cover those in a future post.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that reflect the health of the organization. By quickly scanning an organization’s KPIs one should be able to get a solid idea on how things are tracking against the defined business goals. Some examples might be:

• Response Rate for a direct mail segment
• Number of gifts per day
• Avg days to close a major gift
• Gifts This Month
• Cost Per Dollar Raised

Those are just a few samples, but each one represents a single value that could be calculated and compared vs. an established goal.

Infinity’s KPI Platform

Editing a KPI Definition

Infinity’s base platform support provides the following for KPIs:

• A framework and UI for establishing, securing, and managing KPIs.
• A way to express a goal for a KPI.
• The ability to define warning and alert zones for a KPI as it progresses toward or deviates from it’s goal.
• An automated process to calculate KPI values and cache those values for quick rendering at a later time.
• A mechanism to back-calculate KPI values to establish historical trends.
• RSS support for KPI values so they can be monitored without running the application and logging in.
• A personal dashboard that can be customized by an end user to display the most important and relevant KPIs as the user sees fit.
• The ability to view the dashboard outside the application from any web browser without having to log in and navigate the application (assuming the user is authenticated).
• A stock set of KPI calculations “in the box”.
• Advanced support for creating custom KPIs using an open, extensible XML specification. (you’ll be hearing a lot about “specs” in the Infinity platform as I discuss it in future posts…)

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Steve Mac in his post and Peter Gulka in his response to my previous post both allude to something important about the effect of Web2.0 thinking on business. So much of the Web2.0 hype is focused inappropriately on the new tools coming out and the groovy features (or lack thereof) that they are packing, rather than the changes to business strategy and customer expectations that these tools reflect. Even Seth Godin’s much-touted Org2.0 Cheat Sheet has a heavy emphasis on tools rather than the strategic use of these tools.

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Putting 2006 behind us, of course it’s time to set down our resolutions for the new year. The thing that makes resolutions different from goals or plans is the idea that achieving them is primarily a matter of will or resolve. They can be…

• quantitative (lose 20 pounds!) or qualitative (eat healthier!)
• subjective (be a better person!) or objective (spend 10 hours a month helping out my favorite charity!)
• personal (appreciate the little things more!) or altruistic (make the world a better place!)

…but they are things that challenge us because they challenge our ability to overcome our limitations, our conditioning and our environment.

Of course, I’ve got my list of personal resolutions…..drop 20 pounds, finish the Cooper River Bridge Run in under 50 minutes, and complete a lengthy list of home improvement projects….just to name a few. However, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and come up with a New Year’s Resolution that has an impact on our Products team at Blackbaud and, by extension, the products we deliver. While surfing the web looking for some ideas, most of what I found centered on resolutions like “write more reusable code”, “comply with web standards” or “do more usability testing”; all worthwhile goals, but they didn’t capture my imagination or feel like what I was looking for.

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I just wanted to kick off this blog with a big hello from all of us here at Blackbaud.

We’ve started this site to give our employees a platform to sound off on what they know best: technology, nonprofits, business, and Blackbaud itself. There are a few of us here who have wanted to blog for years, and now we’ll have our chance. We look forward to discussing topics with you, so please leave some comments!

We would love to hear what you think, so if you have a question or comment just let us know.