Announcing new AWS data connector for popular nonprofit CRM: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT

Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software used by nonprofits to communicate with donors and drive fundraising programs. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Nonprofits team announced a new Amazon AppFlow data connector that enables nonprofits to transfer valuable data from Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT to AWS services and other destinations. With improved data insights, nonprofits can personalize communications with constituents, strengthen donor relationships, enhance operational efficiencies, and more.

Cloud-based CRM tools are routinely used to collect, analyze, and leverage data that can help accelerate fundraising. For example, donors expect to receive communications via their preferred channel such as voice, email, or SMS. They also want to know when and how much they prefer to donate. If you’re using Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, then you have data in your account about your donors and prospective donors: how often they donate, demographics, analytics, gift management, and other details.

In this blog post, learn some common nonprofit use cases that can be addressed by integrating your data with other AWS services and commercially available software-as-service (SaaS) applications. You can implement these solutions yourself, with help from AWS Partners, or with AWS Professional Services (AWS ProServe).

Unify donor and constituent data

AWS storage services, combined with Amazon AppFlow, can be used to build a secure, cost-effective system of record or a customer data platform (CDP) for your nonprofit donor data. Examples include storing constituent profile information, whether or not a donor attended a fundraising event, communication preferences, and donation records. You can run data flows to AWS storage services—the act of transferring data to a single, unified location—at nearly any desired frequency, whether it’s regularly scheduled, in response to a donor attending an event, or ad-hoc.

Leveraging Amazon AppFlow, you can ingest CRM data from Blackbaud Razor’s Edge NXT, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho CRM. You can also use Amazon AppFlow to ingest and unify valuable data from other SaaS applications such as Google Sheets, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Marketo, and Paypal.

Learn more about building data platforms like these with the following resources:

• Blog: Unifying data to boost nonprofit fundraising outcomes
• Blog: A modern approach to implementing the serverless customer data platform
• Architecture: Guidance for customer data platform on AWS
• Architecture: Guidance for Donors/Members Data Analytics on AWS

Scalable, secure, and cost-effective data storage and catalog

Nonprofits can rely on storage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store valuable donor data with peace of mind. Amazon S3 offers industry-leading durability, availability, performance, security, and virtually unlimited scalability at very low costs. Services like AWS Glue help you discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development.

AWS Glue can build a data catalogue that lets you to quickly discover and search multiple datasets without transforming the data. Once the data is cataloged, it is immediately available for search and query.

Learn how to build a data lake on AWS with the following resource:

• Video: Building Data Lakes on AWS: Build a simple Data Lake on AWS with AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and S3

Create interactive dashboards without writing any code

Once you’ve unified your data, you can create interactive dashboards to analyze donor trends using Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight provides a self-service way to effectively consume and analyze donor data without the need for writing any code or having to worry about infrastructure.

You can also ask conversational, natural language questions about your data and use Amazon QuickSight Q, an ML-powered engine, to receive relevant visualizations. No business intelligence (BI) training is needed. QuickSight Q uses ML to interpret the intent of a question and analyze the data to quickly provide answers.

Here are some examples of how nonprofits are leveraging Amazon QuickSight and other resources:

• Blog: Visualizing donor data with Amazon QuickSight
• Blog: ProLink uses Amazon QuickSight to enable states to deliver housing assistance to those in need
• Blog: Generating program-defining insights in seconds for child, adult, senior, and military services
• Architecture: Guidance for donor personalized engagement on AWS

Personalizing and strengthening donor and constituent communications

With your unified, securely stored, and cataloged data, you can perform personalized outreach and fundraising communications to donors, members, and other stakeholders with Amazon Pinpoint. Amazon Pinpoint is a multi-channel, targeted communications service that helps automate the process of segmenting, personalizing, and engaging customers.

Amazon Personalize is a fully managed ML service that provides curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation for your donors and constituents. Leveraging Amazon Personalize and Amazon AppFlow, you can further strengthen your personalized email marketing strategy by integrating with marketing and customer management applications such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Zendesk.

Learn how to get started with personalization with these resources:

• Architecture: Guidance for personalized donor emails with Amazon Pinpoint
• Architecture: Guidance for donor personalized engagement on AWS
• Blog: Using machine learning to customize your nonprofit’s direct mailings

Contacting the AWS for Nonprofits team

Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT is the newest data source that can be integrated with a variety of destinations. Using Amazon AppFlow, you can set the destination to any of the connectors listed in the Amazon AppFlow documentation. Contact our AWS for Nonprofits team to learn more about your options for building and deploying these solution and others.

Whether you’re a large, small, or medium-sized nonprofit, AWS is here to help bring your ideas to life. We can help you through the process of building, defining, and implementing an end-to-end data strategy that can enhance the reach of your nonprofit’s mission.

Read more about AWS for nonprofits:

• Unifying nonprofit healthcare data using Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud
• Using Amazon IVS for turnkey town halls
• Optimizing your nonprofit mission impact with AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift ML
• Transforming your credit union’s processes by leveraging the cloud
• Using machine learning to customize your nonprofit’s direct mailings

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