By ccfbarbara on

Is Drupal compatible with Blackbaud products such as Financial Edge, Raiser's Edge and Grantmaker's Edge on the back-end? Do you know of any websites or organizations using Drupal and the aforementioned products successfully or even unsuccesfully?

Thank you,
Barbara

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x

Comments

zeiddev’s picture

zeiddev commented

Barbara,

We develop integrations with all sorts or applications and Blackbaud's products specifically The Raiser's Edge and Enterprise CRM. We have worked on a number of projects integrating Drupal sites and The Raiser's Edge. This has been capturing donation data from the website, synchronizing contacts between the two systems and a number of other solutions that seamlessly integrate Drupal with The Raiser's Edge.

Feel free to get in contact with me via our web site http://www.zeidman.info

Thanks

David

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I would recommend ImportOMatic: http://omaticsoftware.com/Solutions/TheRaisersEdge/ImportOmatic.aspx

My organization is a nonprofit that benefits from the flexibility of Drupal. We use Raiser's Edge, which is admittedly very difficult to integrate into online systems. They offer a CMS of their own but it's incredibly expensive and from the little I've read, not as good as Drupal. We have a large conference of 700+ people held every summer and all of the peopled need to be added to RE. We used to do this by hand, and each person has 60-100 fields, easily. The website is http://university.acton.org, but you won't see much of the registration process unless you make an account.

We use ImportOMatic as the tool to get exported Drupal data into RE. Initially, we looked into the default RE importer, but it does not do crucial things like duplicate searching when importing. IOM will perform duplicate searches and you can let it ask you before importing anyone.

The other side of our solution is an "Extract, transform, load" (ETL) tool that gets our Drupal data into a static CSV file for IOM to read. I worked with a local software development firm called Atomic Object (http://www.atomicobject.com) to build this connector. It was coded in Ruby and PHP. The ETL tool is important for us because it is the determinator for what gets put in each export file. We do a rolling export where nothing gets exported from Drupal unless it has been changed since last time. New records are detected in a nightly cron.

As for Drupal setup, we have a 5 step user registration process. The site runs on Drupal 6. Attendees who get approved have their fields exported into JSON format using Views Bonus. Content is strewn across many content types and one master view cannot cover all the needed fields, so I export JSON in chunks with UID as the common attribute. The ETL connector uses these various JSON exports to link up the fields and create its export file that ImportOMatic uses. It's very custom, but it has been working for the past 2-3 years.