New Raiser’s Edge NXT Query Tool is a Gift for Data Admins
Blackbaud’s release of new Raiser’s Edge NXT capabilities has come as an early holiday present for data admins, who have been waiting nearly a decade for an updated query engine.
Many team members charged with data management are using what the community calls the “database view,” a back-end UX that hasn’t changed much since the 1990s.
Data admins like it because they can:
- Run high-level, complex queries
- Merge queries for list segmentation and excludes
- Globally change or update large numbers of records
When Blackbaud released NXT in 2014, it added a web view UX that made collating and reporting easier for front-facing fundraisers but was missing a lot of critical data-wrangling capabilities—chief among them, the ability to query easily.
This release is a big step forward, bolstering data admins with a query tool in the web UX that allows them to drag and drop query fields (hooray!), copy/paste, and reorder fields more easily in the query builder (no more clicking 17 times to move something to the top). They can now get information with fewer clicks, access more fields, and see recent and favorite queries.
While it’s not yet the full functionality data admins want, the capabilities are in a phased release, and some users already have access. Blackbaud has committed to building some other database view capabilities by the middle of 2025, including:
- Embedding Microsoft’s Copilot AI in Raiser’s Edge so users can direct it to build and run queries
- More donor recognition tools
- Events functionality
- Pledge management tools
- Surfacing the remaining fields not yet available in web view, and
- Export functionality (yes, please!)
That export functionality is a necessity for many data teams and we’re eagerly awaiting that capability in the web view to complete the overall query and export process. Do I recommend getting familiar with the new query tool and testing it out perhaps for more simple use cases? Yes! For now, though, team members who need to export household and summary data still need to use the export in database view.
What’s on your Raiser’s Edge NXT wish list? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
About the Author
Comments