Author: Kayla Barnes
It’s been a busy year across our YourCause solutions! We just hosted our latest round of Product Update Briefings, recapping recently released functionality and giving a peek into upcoming innovation across CSRconnect and GrantsConnect. In this blog, we’ll give a high-level overview of the content we covered. Want to dive deeper? You can still register and watch recordings of our Product Update Briefings by clicking below!
Across our Corporate Impact solutions at Blackbaud, we have aligned our development work around three key strategic themes: Evolve, Expand, and Engage.
Evolve
We are evolving our products to not only meet today’s needs, but to be the solutions for tomorrow’s social good challenges. Our Evolve theme allows us to focus on the maturation of our products, processes, and infrastructure as we look to continue delivering the best-in-class CSR and philanthropic solutions both now and in the future.
Expand
We want to be the leading CSR + ESG provider globally and are on a journey to expand our offerings through strategic distribution, innovation, and industry partnerships as well as further globalization. Our Expand theme centers around using a Global by Design approach to provides updates that meet the needs of charities, companies, and employees located around the world.
Engage
We actively seek out product enhancements and opportunities within the industry to move the needle forward on increasing meaningful engagement. Our Engage theme allows us to focus on enhancements that streamline and optimize the end-to-end user experience, increasing efficiency, providing a more delightful experience, and driving participation.
We’re lucky to have a client base that is just as passionate about improving our products and processes as we are. We have several avenues for clients to give us feedback, product ideas, and participate in product discovery programs. In the recordings of our Product Update Briefings, you might notice a green light bulb associated with many of the enhancements that were recently released and coming soon- these indicate that the enhancement originated from a client idea.
Now for the fun part- let’s take a sneak peek at some of the highlights from our latest Product Update Briefing!
YourCause Product Update Briefing Overview
Evolve
We know that many of the CSR practitioners who are charged with administering CSRconnect wear many hats, and often feel like there’s just not enough hours in the day to get it all done. We’ve had a continual focus on making improvements to the administrative experience in our platform with a goal to save our clients time and increase the autonomy they have to make programmatic changes in the system without the need for their Customer Success Manager to do it for them.
Some of these improvements include continued centralization of admin controls, increased admin approval control on volunteer events by not allowing date changes to events after they’ve been approved, and enhancing data feeds by providing load type options such as the ability to specify by date ranges or incremental timeframes.
Speaking of data, GrantsConnect has also had several improvements in this area, including better data-visualization in your personal dashboards via charts and graphs display values, as well as data flyouts in our budget functionality. In the next 3-6 months, you can also expect to see GrantsConnect evolve by enhancing the login experience for non-SSO (single sign-on) users with Blackbaud ID (BBID), and by ensuring accessibility in our applicant portal.
Expand
Across our YourCause solutions, global capabilities continue to be a huge focus. Earlier this year, we announced a new global processing partner for Germany – Haus des Stiftens. We’ve continued to build on our partnership with Haus des Stiftens and are excited to now offer matching gift capabilities for credit card and offline giving. We also upgraded our API connection with VolunteerMatch to bring in events outside of the United States into the volunteer opportunity feed.
In addition to global volunteering and giving updates, we’ve also turned a lot of attention to improving our vetting capabilities. This includes making it easier for international nonprofits to renew their giving eligibility status and making the experience more transparent for employees and company admins that nominate international nonprofits to undergo our vetting process. Our complimentary nonprofit portal, NPOconnect, houses streamlined process for vetting renewals, guiding international nonprofits along the way with clear communication to ensure information is complete.
Engage
Creating an engaging experience in our solution that is designed to drive participation and impact is always the cornerstone of our innovation priorities. The biggest item we will be delivering to support engagement in 2024 will be with our new solution – Impact Edge. With Impact Edge and Blackbaud Copilot, CSR professionals will have the ability to leverage AI and robust data visualizations to tell their story of impact. This solution will allow you to easily create a compelling picture of your organization’s social impact using data captured safely and securely from employee engagement programs, philanthropic programs, educational initiatives, and other trusted external data sources.