September 2026 Newsletter

Survey

If you haven’t already, would you kindly take a survey for me? It’s about how I might be able to help the RE community further — or not. It should only take you 2-3 minutes to complete. Thank you!

September 15, 2027, for the End of the Database View

I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the announcement about the database view ending on 9/15/27 at my bbcon (Blackbaud conference) presentation on Tuesday, September 29, from 1:30 – 2:15 pm.  If you’re at the conference, please join me. If you’re not, you can register for the free virtual pass and watch the session when it’s available post-conference. The slide deck and resource will appear on the Resources page of my website the day of the presentation. I’ll be sharing more after the conference as well.

Product Management Terminology

In last month’s newsletter I recommended what I believe are the best resources from Blackbaud on preparing for and making the move to the web view. That list prioritized resources from the Blackbaud Product Management team. Just as you and I use specialized terminology in our work that we often have to explain to our colleagues — campaign, query, global change — the Blackbaud product managers often use special terminology that you might not know.

Since the last newsletter recommended you use the product management resources, this newsletter helps explain some of the terminology those fine folks at Blackbaud often use in their webinars and communications with us, especially now that those webinars are happening weekly! (InsideTracks, Town Halls, and Product Update Briefings)

Product Managers: These are the people responsible for understanding what RE users like you and me need the software to do, designing what it should look like, testing those designs, communicating those designs to the programmers, and then testing the new software with users and overseeing the software’s rollout.

Discovery Calls: Product managers or members of the product management team talk to users like us to find out what we need, what we want, how we like or dislike how RE works, etc.  This is the information gathering and research phase to decide what the new version or function should look like.

Engineers: The people most of us used to call software programmers are now often called software engineers.

UI: UI is an acronym for user interface. This is the software, the screens, as you and I encounter it when we use the software when logged in at blackbaud.com.

Prototype: It takes a great deal of time and money for engineers to program software, although that’s getting faster these days with AI-assisted programming. Product managers might build prototypes to test with users before turning the design specifications over to the engineers. Usually in a prototype the software screen, the UI, is somewhat functional so that clicking on a button or an option causes the screen to change, but it’s just a series of screens, the software is not actually storing data or doing anything. This is shared with users since “a picture is worth a thousand words” to get their input regarding functionality, ease of use, etc., to confirm or refine specifications before turning them over to the engineers to program. Sometimes Blackbaud product managers will use prototypes in their events with us to share their plans before any real software is available to show us.

Modal: A modal is the technical, product manager and engineer term for what most of us informally call a pop-up screen. If a screen pops up on top of the existing screen and must be addressed before you can go back to the main screen, it’s a modal. RE web view examples includes the screens that pop up when adding a new constituent, action, and opportunity, and the optimized donation form that sits on top of your web page instead of being a part of it.

API: Software programs can talk with each other “behind the scenes.” You and I might need to write a query and see the results in the UI — on the screen — but the results of that query, the data, can be shared with other software programs that other companies write. In fact, data can be read from and written to RE behind the scenes from other software programs, subject to both the security controls that you and Blackbaud have required as well as the rules that RE enforces (e.g., another program can’t put a name in the Gift Date field, only a legitimate date value). The software that allows software programs to talk to each other to share data this way is called an Application Programming Interface, or API for short. Blackbaud calls their API for RE and their other products the SKY API.  The companies Omatic, Zeidman (Importacular), Red Arc, SmartTHING, and others like them, as well as possibly your own staff, use the API to allow their products and programs to exchange data with RE. These relationships are important to Blackbaud and to us and is why Blackbaud mentions API capabilities frequently in their product management events, often prioritizing API capabilities first before UI functions.

Quarters and Halves: Blackbaud’s product managers talk about schedules in terms of fiscal year quarters and halves because it’s hard to estimate exactly what dates, even months, new fields, features and functions will be available given the complicated process of product management. Blackbaud is a on a calendar fiscal year, so:

• Quarter 1 (often called Q1) is January through March
• Quarter 2 (Q2) is April through June
• Quarter 3 (Q3) is July through September
• and Quarter 4 (Q4) is October through December
• and End of year as currently being used by the product managers means by December 31, 2026
• and H1 or 1H 2027 for “first half” is the period January through June 2027, which will be a busy time for us all!

EAP and CTP: EAP stands for Early Adopter Program and is the period when the engineers have built real software based on the product manager’s design specifications and the software has been initially tested for basic functions and bugs, but now it’s ready for further testing by real users for real work. Those users might find more bugs, might find design mistakes that need to be fixed before the software is released, and might have recommendations about how to further develop the software or manage the release to make it easier for other users. This is real software in real use by real users, but those users understand that the software might have problems and they have a responsibility to test it and report their findings. This is not just a way to get the software earlier, it comes with real work and responsibility. One of the product managers has been using the term CTP and I think she means Customer Tech Preview, the period just before an EAP when there’s real software but it’s not quite ready for real-world work yet.

Waves and General Availability/Release: Often a new screen, feature, or function is a “big enough deal” that Blackbaud does not want to release it to everyone at once. Maybe the EAP concluded successfully but they want to be sure it’s fully working before lots of people potentially have problems. Or, product management expects that there will be enough questions that a lot of users will contact Support and they don’t want Support to be overwhelmed by releasing the functionality to everyone at the same time. Thus, sometimes functionality will be released in waves of sizes, timings, and inclusion criteria of Blackbaud’s choosing so groups of RE organizations get it at a time, not everyone at once. Once everyone has the new software it is generally available or generally released, to use the product management terms.

I hope this helps explain more of the terminology and conversation you will hear from the product managers in their Product Update Briefings, InsideTracks, and Town Halls — all of which you should consider attending now that 9/15/27 is less than a year away. While product managers often try to explain what they’re talking about in the moment, sometimes they’re moving so quickly and there’s so much ground to cover they might forget to explain themselves. But now you know what they mean!