UMHB Turns Days of Manual Reporting into Hours with Raiser’s Edge NXT and Blackbaud Advisory+

When Director of Database and Pipeline Management Joel Shoemake stepped into his role, his vice president’s mandate was clear: move the university from being data-reactionary to data-driven. But the university’s previous system, Jenzabar, couldn’t support that vision. Fundraisers couldn’t access donor information in the field, which made it difficult to record donor interactions in real time. Reporting was equally cumbersome, often requiring staff to manually reformat and transfer information into leadership reports, creating inefficiencies and opportunities for error.

As Shoemake recalled, “Our old product really limited our fundraisers’ effectiveness – we couldn’t even look up a donor’s lifetime giving while out on a donor visit. What we can do now with Raiser’s Edge NXT has been a massive upgrade.”

After transitioning to Raiser’s Edge NXT, the team focused first on improving data fidelity, using the platform’s reporting and query capabilities to identify and correct historical inaccuracies. Working alongside Advisory+, a team of dedicated Blackbaud product experts, Shoemake discovered new ways to leverage the system, from advanced queries and exports to custom attributes that connected data across four separate campus systems. The impact was transformational. Reporting that once took days now takes hours, manual processes have been streamlined or automated, and projects that were previously unattainable, including a one-click endowment report, are now routine.

As reporting capabilities improved, so did confidence in the data. Instead of spending time formatting reports and re-entering information, the team could focus on delivering timely insights to university leadership and equipping fundraisers with reliable information to guide donor engagement. “The real change isn’t just faster reporting. It’s that we can get information into the hands of our fundraisers and leadership team quickly enough to make better decisions,” said Shoemake.

An Expert on Call, Not Another Training Course

To support the transition to a more data-driven approach, the university invested in Advisory+. What began as a structured training engagement quickly evolved into something more practical. Rather than following a prescribed lesson plan, Shoemake brought real-world challenges to each session, using his advisor as a sounding board for new ideas and complex projects.

Shoemake explained how the relationship helped accelerate progress: “Every time I have a harebrained idea, I can go to my advisor, and he won’t dismiss it. He’ll hear me out and tell me if there’s already a product in place, or if I’m two feet to the right of a really good idea, or if we can make the system do what we want.”

The support helped Shoemake move projects forward faster, giving him direct access to an expert who could help validate ideas, troubleshoot challenges, and expand his technical skills. As he put it, “I wish I could get into my doctor as quickly as I can get in with my Blackbaud advisor. I click the link, see availability – usually tomorrow or the next day, book it, and I’m able to move on. The knowledge bottlenecks just aren’t there.”

One-Click Endowment Reports and a Single Source of Truth

One of the highest-impact projects Shoemake tackled was the university’s endowment report, a letter sent to donors with updated information on their endowed funds, scholarships awarded, and giving totals. Producing it used to be a manual, error-prone process complicated by the fact that four departments – Advancement, Financial Aid, the Business Office, and endowment holder, HighGround Advisors – each use different software, different fund names, and different ID numbers. To establish a single source of truth, Shoemake and his student workers tracked down the original memorandum of understanding for every fund, some nearly a century old, and used custom attributes in Raiser’s Edge NXT to map each department’s IDs back to a validated fund record.

Shoemake described the impact across departments: “We were able to go to the different departments and say, not only can we guarantee that the fund name is correct, but we can also speak to you in your language using your ID numbers, and everything can be reported directly out of Raiser’s Edge NXT. We don’t have to trust all of these manual connections between departments anymore.”

The gains extended well beyond endowment reporting. By centralizing and validating information in Raiser’s Edge NXT, the team eliminated software limitations as a source of reporting errors and gained confidence in the data being shared across the university. As Shoemake summarized, “What used to take us days takes hours, and what used to simply not be doable is doable now.”