Hi Everyone,

My name is Nathan Renihan and I am one of the desigers here at Blackbaud. I am working on a few things surrounding contact reports and I was hoping that there might be some people out there that would want to chime in and help me gather some information.  I am interested in two things.

First: General information on contact reports. How do you use them, what information do you want to capture, how are they entered, etc.

Second: If you dont mine sharing, I would love to see sample contact reports. You can email me those at nathan.renihan@blackbaud.com

 This information will help me greatly so I can make sure that what I design best serves the needs of our customers :) Thanks in advance for any help!

 -Nathan

P.S. I see that this forum has no posts so far, so I have also posted this message in the Raiser's Edge forum so I will hopefully get more information.

Nathan we use Action Reports to track the number of contacts each development officer has in a given period of time. We ask them to put in the action, action type and notes capturing a summary of the conversation. We use the action summary report to see activity by action category and type. we also use the action detail report to see the constituents the Development Officer is talking to. what would be helpful in these report is get a summary of the number of constituents that have an action. Current the report gives a summary of the number of actions, however unless I count the names by hand in the detailed report I have no idea if the Development officer has 20 actions on with two constituents or 15 constituents. It would give me as a manager a better feel of how many constituents they are working with. Is this the kind of information you were looking for?

 Hi Mark,

Thanks for this info. This is exactly what I am looking for. What are some sample action types that you might have?

Hi, Nathan

We use actions to track every contact with a donor.  I have set up procedures to ensure the actions are entered consistently for reporting purposes.  Furthermore, I run a series of reports from RE which breaks down the contacts by solicitor, contacts and type.  My next goal is to use the action items to a create a "moves management" process that will allow us to remind users and track the future actions in order to make major gift solicitations.

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Hi Nathan,

Our organization uses actions extensively.  Since we are spread out physically, it is especially important for us to maintain communications regarding projects and constituent contacts.  The use of actions gives staff one consistent place to look for information (whether at the office or in the field) and allows for easy reporting and follow up.  We use them for contact reports as well as for tracking tasks, report /data requests, department & employee metrics, and internal processes.  For contact reports, the action types are Touch- Development, Move-Development, and Power Move- Development.  These are what I report on (in combination with specific solicitors and prospect data for our contact reports).  For task assignments and data requests we use Action types such as General- Advancement Services and General- Alumni Relations.  As far as our use of actions go... a few things would be helpful: 

1)      A field on the general tab that includes Action Title (or some such thing), a text field where we could, in a few words, tell what the action entails specifically.  Notes Title does this quite well but there are a few problems using this field.  When the action is a "follow up action" the notes from the prior action are replicated in the new action, which is nice much of the time but often means the Notes fields from the original action are the ones that show up on a report (unless you pull all of them, which makes for a very long report because all of our contact reports require follow up actions). 

2)      The ability to see a field such as Action Title would also be helpful on the canned reports because currently we can either pull the entire detail or just see the action type (which doesn't give much info).  The same goes for a column/ field such as this on Dashboards, currently you cannot see what the action entails without going into it.

3)      A field such as this Action Title or the ability to pull Notes Title into the action detail that integrates with Outlook would be incredibly useful.  Currently, we just a scheduled block of time with the constituent's name and no further information when we integrate with our Outlook calendars.  A bit more data would be desirable.

4)      Finally, another date field such as Date Assigned would be useful (you can get to this but it's difficult).  We use Actions to schedule specific tasks for staff or set tasks for ourselves (and provide metrics for dept. heads) and we use Action Tracks for projects such as Appeals and Events that create actions for each staff member (such as create Appeal ID, order print items, pull general headcount, pull final mail list, validate addresses, send to printers, add to records, run reports, mark appeal inactive).  For long term actions such as these, it would be useful to know when the action was created or assigned, when it needs to be completed (Action Date) and when it is completed.

These are just a few things off the top of my head that would facilitate our use of RE Actions.... Thanks for the opportunity to give my input!