Denomination makes congregation updates easy
with Blackbaud and Microsoft.

Mennonite Church USA is the largest Mennonite denomination in the United
States with 16 conferences that include approximately 530 congregations
and 62,000 members.

Motivated by the belief that God calls its members to follow Jesus Christ, MC
USA seeks to grow communities of grace, joy, and peace through the power
of the Holy Spirit. One way the denomination ensures strong community
bonds is sharing up-to-date contact information on its congregations. In
achieving that goal, the denomination’s IT team drew on a new certified
connector between the fundraising and relationship management solution
Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® and Microsoft Power Platform™—which
includes Power Apps™, Power Automate™, and Power Virtual Agents™.

The certified connector empowers social good organizations to build
integrated solutions, automate complex processes, and create virtual agents
leveraging Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT alongside hundreds of prebuilt
connectors to Microsoft and third-party solutions.

How a Connector Translates into Time Savings

Ben Regier, business systems analyst and software specialist for Mennonite
Mission Network, the mission agency of MC USA, welcomed the connector’s
capabilities as his organization upgraded to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT.
“A lot of my role has been finding ways to connect software so we can
automate and save employees time,” explained Regier, who also assists
MC USA’s related agencies and the additional congregations of Mennonite
Church Canada.

MC USA and its agencies rely on conference ministers to keep the
congregation contact records current. To help simplify that process, Regier
and his team built an easy online portal:

• Conference ministers use the online portal to quickly view and update
contact information housed in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT.
• Updates made by conference ministers go through an automated approval
process that notifies a database administrator to check formatting of the
update before it is implemented.

Behind the scenes, the IT team created this solution using Microsoft Power
Platform and the Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT certified connector. Team
members built the conference minister portal’s frontend with Microsoft
SharePoint and Power Apps, feeding display information through the
Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT connector. The team built the backend logic,
including automated processes between conference ministers and database
administrators, using Power Automate with the connector.

“Power Automate just makes connecting things a lot quicker,” Regier said.
One way MC USA’s IT team taps into the congregation data stored within
Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT is with the new “Find a Church” search engine
available to its website’s visitors. On the frontend, the search engine utilizes
Microsoft Power BI, a platform with an emphasis on data visualization.

Connections between Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT and Microsoft Power
Platform rely on the power of Blackbaud SKY®—a platform for cloud
innovation that’s optimized for fast, reliable, and secure solutions. The overall
setup “really cuts down on development time and allowsWith Blackbaud SKY’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and the potential to connect with Microsoft Power Platform, Regier saw the potential to speed along Mennonite Church USA’s upgrade to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. On a professional level, Regier said he enjoyed the chance to participate in Blackbaud’s early adopter program as it established the connector with Microsoft. “It’s fun to get to play with new things and to have a voice in the direction of where things go.” you to connect more easily,” Regier explained.