Blackbaud blogs reveal news.... and gossip
If you use Raiser's Edge or any Blackbaud product in your fundraising program - you might be familiar with BlogBaud.com - a nonprofit blog written by Blackbaud employees.
You may also be familiar that others besides this site - like the Nonprofit Tech Blog - are covering Blackbaud's acquisition of eTapestry.
Less well known - yet very interesting is a group called the Blackbaud User Society (BlackBUS). Their blog and discussion board is a non-vendor suite of forums created and maintained by volunteers in order to share experiences, ideas and other relevant information as users of products from Blackbaud. They claim that of the 15,000 clients, they just registered the 1000th member of the BlackBUS community... that's 7% of all clients.
Finally. Even if you knew about those two pieces, you most likely haven't heard that Oracle could be considering an acquisition of Blackbaud. Barron's Online quoted Cowen's Peter Goldmacher as saying BLKB is on his list of Oracle's potential targets.
Hmmmm..... maybe Oracle is interested in buying this blog.
3 comments:
Since writing that 1000th member post we have the following statistics:
Threads: 2,004
Posts: 11,902
Members: 1,246
Active Members: 467 (logged in within last 30 days)
Note also that many of these member records are people that work for the same org, or are consultants. Therefore it does not equate directly to a percentage of the entire Blackbaud clients base.
That being said, over the last couple of months we are averaging between 3 and 5 new memberships per day, with an average on-site visit time of over 9 minutes.
We have a guided tour here: http://www.blackbus.org/?dftid=1427968
Thanks for the update Peter. I think you have a great site that offersboth practical advice from users and also candid insight on how to work more productively with Blackbaud representatives.
We have also just received confirmatiuon that for a second consecutive year, BlackBUS members will have a pre-conference meeting with the product developers in order to discuss our highest priorities for updates, patches and features to the software. All items gathered on our Ideas Inventory will be collated, and the ideas rteceiving the highest votes will be presented as our wish list. We get a chance to discuss them with the developers and share our stories on why these features are important to us.
More than just a disucssion board - we can leverage our numbers to make a better product, which in turn helps us do our jobs better, which helps us raise more money, which helps improve the quality of life for individuals and families :)
Whew. That was long.
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