Static links for "What's New" announcements

The recent change to a model where every Monday afternoon we get emailed an announcement of what's new for the week for Blackbaud Education Management Solutions, and then we follow the link, and then we click a link to the actual what's new page, and that link to the actual what's new page is the same every week, and there's no way to link to an individual announcement on that page, and if we share that announcement page with a colleague there's no guarantee that they'll be seeing the announcements that we were trying to share with them, and the current week isn't even in the "what's recent" archive so you can't hack around it that way to send a colleague a permanent link...

...this new system is a trash fire.

I want to be able to easily send a link -- that will be permanent (a "permalink", if you will) -- to an announcement to my colleagues.

  • Seth Battis
  • Apr 29 2024
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  • Daniel commented
    15 May 15:47

    I have to assume this was changed to Blackbaud no longer has to write detailed blog posts for product updates.

    As everyone has mentioned, this just doesn't work:

    1. The blog posts were much more reader-friendly

    2. The link points to the general "What's New" page, from which you have to find the update you're looking for - people aren't always looking for the most recent update!

    Practically this makes it harder to share with others. Staff buy-in to new software and changes to existing software is already a pain point, which is much worse when they don't know about an update until they notice something different while working.

    The comments on the first blog post with this change echo comments here. Blackbaud, listen to your users. Change this back!

  • Lauren Henderson commented
    30 Apr 13:07

    Seth, thank you for condensing my thoughts around this change in a coherent way! I don't have access to the resources to re-create this internally for wider communication and distribution.

    I very much appreciate the information, but much preferred the previous format.

  • Mathieu Farrugia commented
    29 Apr 19:37

    100% agree on the slide out. This subscription to posting on a community forum and then multiple clicks to the get the actual meat of the changes is NOT an improvement. It's almost as if BB wants to discourage us to read about new features and fixes.

  • Guest commented
    29 Apr 19:12

    i miss the what's new alerts in the slide out