The Raiser's Edge Announcements

• Raiser's Edge upgraded to version 7.91

  On Saturday February 6, 2010 The Raiser's Edge software was upgraded to version 7.91. The primary feature of this new release is improved security of credit card processing.

  If you are interested in learning more about the new features and enhancements available in this version of RE, you can read these Release Highlights provided by Blackbaud.

• Current students now available on RE

  All currently enrolled UA students, those who have paid for at least 12 credit hours, are now listed as constituent records in the RE. In addition to their student status, their class standing is also provided. This information is extracted from UIS, so it is subject to the same frailties of the UIS content. Graduate students have also been included. Current students may be recognized by the RE constituency code of "Student" as displayed on the Bio2 tab and at the bottom left-hand corner of the Bio1 tab. A student's Class Standing is provided on the Attribute tab with an attribute labeled "Class Standing."

  This data will be updated each semester following the 21-day official registration deadline. With this new capacity we will be able to track UA students as they progress toward completing their degrees and becoming alumni. Should students elect to leave the UA we are also able to monitor that path and change those constituency codes to "non graduate."

  It is believed that providing this information will be of profound value, but please remember that as you collect information from RE, current UA students will be included, unless you specifically select to prevent their inclusion. This reminder will be especially important when one considers lists for direct mail solicitations, or other forms of broadcasting information. Be mindful of using "Constituency Code" as a filter in Queries and Reports.

• Education Interests Moved

  Information about interests while a constituent was a UA student has been moved from the Education tab to the Attribute tab. The original location of this information was an artifact of the data conversion, and, as we used RE, it became apparent that keeping this information on the Education tab minimized its value. The information is now found in an attribute labeled "Education Interests" with the other constituent attributes making its location more consistent and logical with other relevant information.

• Constituent Codes - Explained

  Constituent Codes are the primary labeling device for the records of RE. These codes provide, at a glance, the fundamental relationship the person or organization has with the UA. There is a specific hierarchy for these codes, which should be honored. In order of primacy, the constituent codes for RE are as follows with a short definition:

  Individuals

  Alumnus	A person with a UA degree and a Date Graduated
  Non Graduate	A person who attended the UA, but never received a UA degree and the Date Graduated field is blank.
  Honorary Alumnus	A person who has received an honorary UA degree
  Friend	A person who has not attended or received a degree from the UA, but has established a relationship with the UA either by giving or direct expression of interest UA programs
  Student	A person currently enrolled for at least 12-credit hours at the UA
  Parent	A person who is a parent of a current UA student.
  Parent Of	A specialty record for the use of the Annual Giving Program only
  Net Donor	A person who has made at least one gift via the online giving interface at www.uafoundation.org

  By definition, individuals must have a Primary constituency code. However, it is possible that individuals may have secondary constituency codes. For example, an alum who also gives via the online interface will have a primary constituency code of Alumnus, and a secondary code of Net Donor. It is never possible to have Alumnus and Non Graduate in any order as simultaneous primary and secondary codes. Alumnus and Non Graduate always take primary position over the other constituency codes.

  Organizations

  Corporation	Corporations, partnerships, and cooperatives that have been organized for profit-making purposes, including corporations owned by individuals and families and other closely held companies.
  Corporate Foundation	A company-sponsored foundation created by a business corporations and funded exclusively by their companies
  Foundation	Personal and family foundations and other foundations and trusts that are private tax-exempt entities operated exclusively for charitable purposes.
  Religious Organization	Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and other houses of worship, as well as their denominational entities, hierarchies, and service groups
  Fundraising Consortia	Entities that have been formed by a group of cooperating institutions or organizations for the purpose of facilitating their fundraising activities Examples are The United Negro College Fund and the United Way
  Other Organizations	All organizations not defined above other than governmental agencies
  Government Entities	Agencies of municipal, county, state, and federal governments; may also include foreign governments and tribal governments, including tribal enterprises. In general, transactions from this group should not be included in The Raiser's Edge by UA Gift Policy.
  Donor Advised Fund	A private fund owned and managed by a non-profit organization created for the purpose of managing charitable donations on behalf of an organization, family, or individual. The DAF donor is the owning non-profit organization, not those for whom the fund is managed.
  Estate	Used most often by The Office of Gift Planning to describe gift distributions from matured estate plans

  Unique definitions prevent the application of multiple constituency codes to organizations.

• Changing Constituent E-mail Addresses Type Protocol

  Please do not change an email type from "Email" to "Email (Former)" based on a response from a single e-mail broadcast. The standard convention is to wait until the email address has bounced back as undeliverable 5 times. An exception to this condition is when you have a direct request from the constituent to change their email address.

  Please note that when you directly broadcast e-mail messages from your workstation, rather than using a properly authenticated e-mail broadcast engine, you will look identical to spammers resulting in unintended consequences and possibly false conclusions. There are a number of reasons why you may receive a message from the System Administrator that the email you sent is undeliverable. The ISP will "bounce" the email because the sender is not recognized as a legitimate sender; the recipient's mail box is full; you need to be "invited" to send email to a recipient (SPAM Filtering) and for a variety of other reasons.

  At present, if you are trying to send mass e-mail to a group of UA alumni, you should contact the UA Alumni Association and take advantage of the authenticated e-mail broadcast engine they use. If your need is to send e-mail to a variety of RE constituents beyond alumni only, we ask you to consider waiting until we have installed the Blackbaud e-mail broadcast engine, Net Community. When the NetCommunity email broadcast functionality is made available we will be able to use the tools associated with this software package to properly manage the various responses to e-mail broadcasts. If you cannot wait until then, please proceed with caution. You do not want your workstation, or your unit's e-mail server, to be blacklisted for failing to adhere to current e-mail conventions.

• School Affiliation Attribute

  There will be times when you want to communicate with UA undergraduate degree holders, graduate degree holders and non-graduates for your college. Remember that most graduate degree holders have the Graduate College properly listed as their college of record at the UA. In order to simply your ability to collect together all those you want to reach we have added a "School Affiliation" to the Education attribute tab.

  This attribute is defined by the logic shared by the UA Registrar's Office to map the combination of official UA College, degree, and major to the currently existing UA colleges. For example, someone who graduated in 1960 with a Chemistry degree from the no longer extant College of Liberal Arts will have a School Affiliation indicating the College of Science, where the Chemistry department now happily lives. The "School Affiliation" attributes are updated every evening to properly reflect record updates made each day.

  This attribute is not intended to replace the official information recorded on the Education tab. It is provided only for user ease. Those queries or reports that require "official" information should rely upon using the proper combination of college, degree, and major.

• UA Cares Pledges Are Entered

  Payroll deduction pledges made by UA employees during the UA Cares Campaign have been entered into RE. They are recognized by finding the value of UA Payroll Deduction in the "Ref no./date" field found on the Gifts tab. At this time (2/28/2008), only the January 4, 2008 payments have been applied against these pledges. Subsequent payments in January and February will be added to RE shortly.

• New Fund Attributes

  In order to make the categorization of RE Funds easier by department and/or college, we have added two new attributes to the Funds. On the Attribute tab of a specific RE Fund, you will now find "Dept Name" and "College/Unit Name", in addition to the previously existing "Dept Number." These definitions come from the official UA roster of unit names and numbers. The new attribute values were assigned based on the "Dept Number". If there is an error, please report it to for correction.

  These new attributes allow one to collect the various RE Funds unique to a department or college for queries and reports. An example on how to use these attributes is provided on the RE Support FAQ web page.

• Organization Structure

  One of the legacies of data conversion to RE was the inability to simply take old organization data and have it properly fit into the data structures of RE. Especially important to this process is taking advantage of the relationship capacities of RE to properly describe all the components of a single organization. Our goal is to provide an integrated view of the organization at each level.

  Imagine a bank with local branches reporting to regional headquarters, in turn reporting to statewide headquarters, and then the corporate headquarters. This bank also has a corporate foundation, and a matching gift operation distinct from the bank and the corporate foundation. It also offers a variety of services to customers through separate subsidiaries distinct from the local branches. Our goal is to establish proper parent-sibling relationships for all these parts, and to make it straight forward to attach information in RE to the proper part of the organization, including the employees.

  There has been much discussion about this task, and we have been deliberate in our pace to create this solution such that it may be applied to all forms of organizational relationships. Much of the discussion has been critical, but perhaps the example above brings proper perspective to the dimensions of the problem and the absolute need to have a clever and useful response. Staff from Information Services, Development Research, and Foundation Relations has devoted significant energy to providing a comprehensive solution.

  We have identified the 150 organizations with which the UA has the most developed relationships, and we are focusing on these enterprises first. The first 25 organizations from this list have been properly parsed and we are exploring a programmatic solution to properly structuring these organizations and their component parts in RE. When we believe we have found the correct path, we will deploy the solution to these most important organizations first, and use a similar strategy for the remainder.

  We fully appreciate the momentary frustration RE users feel about the pace of this progress, and we are resolved to fully evaluate, test, and retest to prevent the introduction of error into the database. When we are certain we are making things better, we will announce the results. Thank you for your ongoing patience in this specific matter. The end and success are within sight.