CharityEngine Blog

CharityEngine Academy: Training Made Easy

Written by Jessica Mocha-Piel | Fri, Apr 19, 2024

It’s a good problem to have! CharityEngine’s fundraising software is so robust that it often takes clients a while to explore all the features and learn all the ways the system can help them raise more money.  

CharityEngine’s Professional Services team, which is responsible for onboarding new clients, sprang into action. They launched CharityEngine Academy, an online training resource for clients. 

It’s not just for teaching clients the ins and outs of the system. It’s ideal for nonprofits training new team members, and it’s an on-demand answer to common questions we’re asked.  

Putting the Power in Your Hands 

How does it work? Clients request login credentials from our ProServ team and then access the recorded video modules. 

It’s important to note that the collection of modules is growing every week. If there’s a training video you’d find helpful, our team takes requests! 

Each module or course has a detailed table of contents, helping clients zero in on exactly what they want to learn. After the training, clients are given a survey to complete, ensuring that feedback is gathered. Your suggestions and recommendations are crucial to refining the modules and perfecting the CharityEngine Academy to make the courses as helpful as possible. 

Finally, related articles are linked under a Resources heading, so there are additional steps if you desire more information. 

Please note that training is not limited to the Academy. Clients are trained live during implementation, and two teams (Customer Service and Client Success) take over after implementation. You can always contact a real human being at CharityEngine! The Academy is a convenient supplemental option for clients wanting to learn at their own pace. 

Let’s look at some of the courses available now.  

Courses Available in CharityEngine Academy 

As indicated, courses are regularly added to the academy. There are 14 basic training videos and five basic user acceptance testing videos. 

Training Courses  

  • Advocacy training demonstrates how to create an advocacy issue, send it to constituents, and create and manage custom targets. 
  • Basic Importing and Data Appending is helpful for clients importing data into CharityEngine. The course covers how to prepare data for importing, import different types of data, manage duplicate records, and use the importer tool for data appending. 
  • Contact Management is a course that teaches how to create contact records and how to access out-of-the-box fundraising reports. 
  • Donation Management covers creating a transaction record, reporting on the records, and configuring/customizing the donations application. 
  • Sustainer Management is a course that helps you create and manage sustainer records. 
  • Auctions training offers a tutorial on configuring, monitoring, and processing auctions in CharityEngine. 
  • Emails and Campaigns training demonstrates creating and sending emails, building opt-in lists, and monitoring email-related reports. 
  • Events and volunteer management are a breeze with CharityEngine. This course teaches you how to create and manage events, build a registration form, manage your volunteers, and report on event-related metrics. 
  • Dashboard training quickly shows you the immense amount of information at your fingertips when you log into the fundraising platform. 
  • Opportunities/Moves Management demonstrates how easy it is to automate your moves management. You’ll learn how to create and use an opportunity and review reporting and automation capabilities. 
  • Set Up and Customization for Moves Management teaches how to use opportunity pipelines to help track the donor journey. 
  • Reporting and Analytics training unveils CharityEngine's powerful reporting and analytics tools. You’ll learn how to access the off-the-shelf reports and create custom reports to track any metrics you choose. 
  • Online Web Forms covers your donation form, event forms, and newsletter forms. You’ll learn how to create and manage forms as well as how to test them and report on them. And we’ve got lots of content about the best practices for form creation! 
  • Peer-to-peer offers guidance on an outreach and engagement strategy our clients use often: launching a peer-to-peer campaign. In this course, you’ll learn how to get your campaigns and team pages set up and the steps you take to start raising money. 

User Acceptance Testing Courses 

  • UAT: Campaigns App consists of five parts, each offering hands-on training. You will use the app to perform a number of tests, send your first email, and build an opt-in list. 
  • UAT: Configuration App will walk users through the configuration app within CharityEngine. You will review general account settings, create and manage account users, and review overall settings for different categories within your account. 
  •  UAT: Contacts App has you perform several tests, edit existing contact records, and create a new contact record. 
  • UAT: Donations App explores the donations application. You’ll learn how to view and manage transaction records, explore the contact listing functionality, and see how to create transaction records. 
  • UAT: Online App has six parts. In completing this module, you will build your first donation form and customize your user center. 

CharityEngine’s team is committed to offering a robust program for users. Keep an eye on our CharityEngine Academy offerings - they're increasing! 

A Partner to Nonprofits 

CharityEngine is uniquely committed to helping our nonprofit partners change the world. Our customer service and attention are second to none; each client has access to all necessary resources. The CharityEngine Academy is one item in a long list of ways we serve our clients!