Creating a Raiser's Edge Data Dictionary

Here is a practical use for AI that I found essential in understanding the complexities of Raiser’ Edge NXT.

I always found the web documentation for the Blackbaud API fairly unhelpful. It was agonizingly difficult to jump back-and-forth between tables and fields.

The solution was to make a data dictionary. I instructed perplexity AI to review the web documentation, community pages, and other developer sources for specifics on the API. I instructed it to build an Excel sheet with one tab for each record type. I asked for what data type, character length, anything else the documentation revealed, etc. it took three or four attempts and clarifications to get the details correct, but in the end it produced a detail the data dictionary that can be used in a number of ways.

• Add your own field uses

• Review for possible redundancies

• Use to create an archive repository of Raiser’s Edge records in your system of choice - SQL Server, Snowflake, Oracle, even something like Airtable.

• Build your own applications from the Blackbaud APIs

• Refine your understanding of the Raiser’s Edge table structure

Download the file from my website. What do you think? Is it accurate? Missing something? Let me know and I will update it.