The popularity of giving circles is on the rise today. While I do see the value of combining my interests and money with the interests and money of others to do more good (more money = more good, right?), I am worried these circles will ultimately hurt nonprofits.

I imagine that if you’re reading this you probably know what a giving circle is, but let me just make sure. A giving circle is a group of individuals who pool their money and, collectively, decide where to donate that money.

Giving circles have been around for generations, and they are now becoming much more popular. Even I belong to a very loosely organized circle with some friends who support a couple of causes. We got together because we thought if we combined our money and made one larger gift to a nonprofit it would certainly make more of a difference. Have we made more of a difference? Dunno. Maybe I’ll do some analysis and make a future posting about that.

Touted as a way for people to get more involved in the fundraising process and to make a bigger impact with their donated dollars, giving circles make it hard for nonprofits to get access to individuals, where connections and real relationships are built. It’s through these personal relationships we build with volunteers and donors that our organizations grow, and how we “move” donors through a variety of stages, ultimately to a place where they are sincerely engaged in what we do. Giving circles take away our access to the individual and limit the interactions we can have at a one-to-one level. And, as giving circles grow and their interests change, it’s difficult for nonprofits to find funding for multiyear projects.

And, larger, more organized giving circles can require significant accountability reporting about the impact their contribution has made. While larger nonprofits may have the staff to fulfill these requirements, my friends at smaller organizations tell me they are hesitant to go to giving circles because of the reporting burden. Says a friend, “Going to our regional giving circle is like going to a major foundation. There are just too many hoops to go through, and I don’t have the staff to do this.” At the same time, she has found that several of her “rising donors” now give exclusively through the circle, effectively eliminating her access to them directly.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts!

Happy Fundraising!

I’d love to see more folks taking advantage of our APIs. So, while driving home last night I thought to myself that it would be cool to start up a little open source API community where together we can post and modify samples in an open source format. So in just a few minutes today at lunch I was able to easily set up a Blackbaud community on Microsoft’s CodePlex.

I also uploaded a sample that demonstrates how to write a simple plugin using the Raiser’s Edge 7.81 and Visual Basic .NET 2005.
You can view the project page here.
(Note this sample will only work with RE 7.81 or later, since 7.81 ships with the required .NET 2.0 support files)

Did you know that Plugins do not require an API license to create? That’s right, grab this sample, play with it, make your own plugins and contribute them to the project/community! The only restriction I am making is I am putting all code under a Creative Commons License.

I’ll be up front with you, I probably won’t have much time to field direct questions on any code I post. Also, this isn’t officially suported Blackbaud product. That said, if you are looking for a place to learn more about using our extensive APIs and plugins, I hope this community will serve as a launch pad. I’ll upload more stuff when I get free time and inspiration. What I’d most like to see is what you come up with.

Now go buy that .NET book and start coding! Be sure to let me know if you’d like to contribute code or projects, I’ll add you to the open source team. Make something really cool and we may ask you to join the Blackbaud Product Development team

Shaun

[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!

(more…)

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.