Data is key to determining both the challenges our fundraising teams are facing and the accomplishments they've made. As technology changes, accessibility to data requires new tools especially when it involves data stored in private vendor clouds - a practice that is becoming more and more common. Children’s Minnesota Foundation has been on a data journey that started with a focus on acquiring data, loading a data warehouse, and building the mechanisms to view and interact with the data. To move from concept to reality, in 2021, the foundation team partnered with The Zuri Group in the development of Aqueduct. Aqueduct has become the foundation’s go-to, turn-key, data aggregation solution to assimilate data from Blackbaud’s private cloud as well as other in-house systems. All this comes together in an Aqueduct delivered dimensional data warehouse allowing foundation staff to efficiently use enterprise reporting tools (Power BI and Reporting Services) to drive important and impactful data-driven decisions.

1. WOODMARK
SUMMIT
Our journey: Moving data from vendor
clouds to our desktops for on-premise data
analytics solutions
2022

2. 2 0 2 2 W O O D M A R K S U M M I T
Housekeeping
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3. LEADING SPONSORS
PREMIER SPONSORS
SUPPORTING SPONSORS

4. Director of Foundation
Operations
Children's Minnesota
Foundation
Dan Lantz
President, CRM Services
Zuri Group
Ken Swift
Presenters
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5. Introductions
Poll questions
How'd we got here? Our Journey
Our process implementing Aqueduct
Review Children's Minnesota Foundation Data
Visualizations in Power BI
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Agenda
Introducing Aqueduct
What's Next? Extending Aqueduct

6. • This presentation highlights our journey towards finding a more advanced reporting and
data solution
• Let's review a few bits of technical jargon/acronyms used
• CRM
• On-premise
• Vendor cloud
• API / Blackbaud SKY API
• RE NXT
A few notes as we get started:
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7. • Director of Foundation Operations
• Joined Children's Minnesota in 2013
• Supervise the Strategic Information Management Team and the Prospect Management Team
• Other duties include managing vendor relationships regarding technology and data systems
• Previously worked in a similar role in higher education nonprofit at the U of M Foundation
• Past experience includes nonprofit operations which included project mgmt. and application development,
specifically RE.API development, web development and building business intelligence solutions using SQL
Server Analysis, Integration and Reporting Services
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Dan Lantz, Children's Minnesota Foundation

8. •President of CRM Service
•Joined Zuri Group in 2014 to build a CRM Service Practice
•Previously managed Enterprise Technology Service at Blackbaud for 8+ years.
•Extensive IT software development career prior to becoming a consultant
•Always looking for ways to solve business challenges through the use of technology.
Ken Swift, Zuri Group
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Poll
Question
What version of Raiser's
Edge (or other CRM) are you
using?

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Poll
Question
Do you currently have a
data warehouse?

11. From hosted, to on-premise, and back again
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2013 - Raiser's Edge
hosted by
Blackbaud
Virtualization
technology
becomes common
2015 - Raiser's Edge
7 brought back on-
premise
Substantial
partnership
conversation and
Hospital and
Foundation
Leadership changes
2019 – a great idea
is born during a
conversation at the
2019 Nashville, TN
Blackbaud
Conference for
Nonprofits (bbcon)
Data visualization
tools are readily
available (Power
BI,Tableu, Qlik)
2019 - Move back to
hosted with
Blackbaud with
Raiser's Edge NXT
Substantial
worldwide pandemic
- COVID :(
2021 – Aqueduct
becomes available.
Power BI, and Power
BI Report Builder are
implemented
Trend towards use of
vendor clouds and
data availability
through API's
2021/2022 –
Visualizations
developed and
released to
Foundation
customers

12. Our goals:
• Provide both summary data and the detailed data behind it to make data-driven decisions
• Faster response times
• Interactivity between data (date filter, primary gift solicitor, proposal type)
• Gain information on slowly changing dimensions
• Eliminate the manual effort behind the creation of a multi-page (15) Excel report
combining data from multiple on gift officer actions, proposals and portfolios
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Why do we want a data warehouse?

13. Why not just use reports in RE NXT?
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We were presented with several challenges during our search for
a way to create complex interactive reports from data stored in
RE NXT:
• Complex interactive reports weren't easily available via RE NXT
lists, Report Builder or Crystal Reports.
• We also discovered that not every field in RE NXT was
available.
• RE NXT does have info on some slowly changing dimensions
(prospect status for example) but it isn’t available to export

14. Aqueduct's key requirements
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Overcoming our challenge. The case for Aqueduct.
Channel nonprofit data anywhere, anyway, and anytime:
• Host on-premise, in your own private cloud or a public cloud (i.e. Azure, AWS)
• Use any reporting or analytics of your choice; such as Power BI, Tableau, Qlik
• Schedule your data refresh as often as desired

15. Our process towards implementing Aqueduct
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A small team of five from both Children's Minnesota Foundation (3) and Zuri (2) met weekly
to accomplish two tasks:
1. Create components needed to run Aqueduct. Our partnership with our ITS Team was
essential. Strongly consider the cloud hosted option.
2. Determine what visualizations would be included in phase I. Using existing multi page
(15) Excel report we began to wireframe the visualizations needed for Power BI.

16. Our on-premise Aqueduct components
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Virtual server created​ to run
Aqueduct on premise.
SQL Server database created
or our enterprise version
of SQL Server. Power BI
installed on server and access
via a web page.
Installers, RE API tokens, and
logs available on Aqueduct web
site.

17. Accessing the Power BIVisualizations/Reports
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18. Visualizations: Portfolio and Proposal Summary
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Filter by prospect
classification
Display % of
prospects within a
prospect
classification
Summary info
on portfolio
and proposals
linked to gift
officers
Visualizations
connecting portfolio
prospects,
fundraisers,
proposals and
prospect
classification
Select single or group
of fundraiser(s)

19. And detail...
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20. Visualizations: Proposal Detail Grid
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21. Visualizations: Portfolio and Proposal Summary
Grid
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22. Visualizations: Action Summary
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23. Visualizations: Prospect Information
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24. 2 0 2 2 W O O D M A R K S U M M I T
What's next? Extending Aqueduct
Here's some of the ideas we've come with so far:
• Foundation Reports - Power BI Report Builder - paginated report development
• Regular data flow to DonorSearch
• Gaining expertise on developing Power BI reports/data so that in-house we can use the
data within the data warehouse to build ad-hoc reports
• Slowly changing dimensions
• Grateful Patient

25. Email: dan.lantz@childrensmn.org
URL: childrensmn.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/redeftboy/
Twitter: @redeftboy
Dan Lantz
Email: ken@zurigroup.com
URL: zurigroup.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethswift/
Ken Swift
Contactinfo
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More info on RE NXT products from the Zuri Group can be
found at https://labs.zurigroup.com/aqueduct/

26. Questions?
Insights?

27. Please evaluate this session
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where you joined from today.
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28. THANKYOU