Apps open doors to creative transformation of
workflows—no IT experience required

At Bennington College in Vermont, students define the direction of their
learning, working closely with faculty to design the content, structure, and
sequence of their study. “They are answering a question or solving a problem
that matters to them, and their education supports them to take that
wherever it leads,” Director of Advancement Services Dan Snyder explained.
With that same spirit of discovery, Snyder is improving how his division works
as he automates processes and realizes new possibilities with the flexibility
of Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT—the leading solution for fundraising and
relationship management—and Certified Connectors to the Microsoft
Power Platform.

An ecosystem of apps that includes Power Automate, Microsoft Power
Platform supports “citizen developers” such as Snyder, who creates the
Office of Institutional Advancement’s fundraising reports and keeps them
updated. “Power Automate and the Raiser’s Edge NXT connectors have
transformed my work and allowed me to completely automate our reporting
process,” he explained.

Snyder has found these tools empower citizen developers, who may lack
formal computer science training but have an aptitude for thinking through
processes logically and using low-code tools to automate them. “We’ve all
probably started in the same place of, ‘Hey, what is this automation stuff?’”
he said. “It’s a great learning experience, and it’s such a benefit from the
time savings alone. Once you get going, you can keep building on it.”

Realizing Time-Saving Efficiencies

The first opportunity that piqued Snyder’s interest was the chance to improve
the way Bennington recorded online gift notifications. “We were saving them
manually as PDFs, and that takes a lot of time.”

Working with Power Automate, Snyder created a new process in which the
email notification of an online gift automatically triggers the creation of a PDF
record that is stored for the division on Google Drive and tied to the donor’s
database information.

Around 60% of gifts to Bennington College are made online—more than
3,300 a year. Not having to manually save and store a PDF copy of the email
notification for each gift translates into time savings of 55 work hours a year,
based on Snyder’s estimates. That’s time the division’s small staff can devote
to other more strategic tasks and improvements.

Snyder also boosted efficiency when he automated a manual export-import
process that credited donors in the college’s records for gifts, including those
that arrive through more complicated paths, such as donor-advised funds. As
a result, a process that previously took 2 ½ hours of work a week only takes
½ hour and can be easily completed, even when Snyder is out of the office:
another 100 or so annual work hours saved.

Overall, Snyder estimated Bennington saves at least 300 hours per year thanks
to the efficiencies achieved with the no-code and low-code tools of Microsoft
Power Automate and the connectors to Raiser’s Edge NXT. “The extensibility of
being able to add those attributes that I need for reporting and being able to
refresh that data without having to touch it has really been a game-changer.”
In addition to streamlining already existing workflows, Snyder uses the tools
to create opportunities that might not have been possible before, such as a
system to support the college president in sending personal birthday notes
to key donors with the benefit of input from gift officers. “That happens
without anybody really having to manage it,” Snyder said.

As Snyder started to make headway with his automation projects,
Bennington College achieved some of its best fundraising years, in part due
to large single gifts. “Some of what we were starting to do and track with
automations helped us to keep on top of those important relationships and
know where we were with fundraising and where we needed to go.”

Joining Others on a Journey of Discovery

Although he has no technical training as a developer, Snyder has not been
entirely self-taught either. He has had a whole community to help teach him
the ropes and Blackbaud Accelerator courses to speed his learning about the
Microsoft Power Platform.

Those courses are available to any Blackbaud customer through on-demand
videos in Blackbaud’s free Microsoft Power Platform resources library, which
includes time-saving templates created by the Blackbaud team as well as
Blackbaud customers, including Snyder, who won the first ever Community
Award at Blackbaud Developers’ Conference for his contributions helping in
community and inspiring others.

Blackbaud also provides several learning opportunities a year through its
bbdevdays events, which provide enablement and best practices training
to both developers and customers who don’t have a technical developer
background. “We’re committed to ensuring our solutions are flexible for
everyone, and we’re especially excited about equipping non-developers
to extend and enhance their Blackbaud solutions through automation,”
explained Heather McLean, Blackbaud developer and partner success
manager, who leads customer trainings at the events.

Snyder is also an active member of the peer-driven Blackbaud Community,
which connects Blackbaud’s customers to one another and to best
practices, enabling them to learn together about their Blackbaud solutions
and tools for flexibility, like Microsoft Power Platform. “So many people
are willing to share their knowledge, expertise, and time in the Blackbaud
Community,” Snyder said. “It really is a great benefit.”

And he’s happy to pay it forward. “I’ve had a lot of people throughout
my career—and specifically with Power Automate—who have really been
generous in sharing their time with me, and I try to do the same for other
folks where I can.”