Contact Management

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our contact management in DonorPerfect webinar. The purpose of today’s session is to review processes that help us manage our deadlines on a task by task basis, within each of your constituent records, this is all about focusing in on the data Read More

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our contact management in DonorPerfect webinar. The purpose of today’s session is to review processes that help us manage our deadlines on a task by task basis, within each of your constituent records, this is all about focusing in on the data that’s found on the contact data entry screen of the donor profile, and how it relates to data entry automation and reporting on tasks related to donor management for yourself, your colleagues and within specific periods of time. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the absolute honor of getting to be your guys trainer today for this Contact Management webinar. Now, before we get started with the actual content, I have a little participation activity for you guys. So we are using zoom as our platform, so you can feel free to either write yes or no into the chat, or you can use the reaction button to raise your hand. But essentially, I’m going to ask a series of questions, and if this applies to you, you can put yes in the chat, or you can raise your hand. So how many of you want a quick and easy way to manage your to do list of upcoming tasks or donor touch points.

Diana says me, yes, absolutely. And Sarah says, me too. And you want to be able to create an audit trail of group communications. So you know when you send out mass market emails or if you do a large scale direct mail appeal, we know who the recipients of those communications are. Diana’s like, yes, absolutely. All right, and do you want to be able to easily produce reports so each staff member knows what donors they’re responsible for communicating with, and be able to monitor that those touch points are being completed. Yes, yes, yes. 100% All right, so we are in the right place, because that’s the whole focus of today’s session. It’s all going to go back to the very beginning, which is understanding the data entry so what fields are captured within every donor contact that gets created, so that we can actually facilitate those types of Reports and Lists. We’ll talk a little bit today about how DonorPerfect can automate the creation of contact records, especially as it relates to those more one to many communications, we’ll touch on some helpful tools to help streamline and begin to set up the contact management piece. And we’re going to look at a few ways that DonorPerfect can help remind you and other staff members about your upcoming touchpoints, as well as some reports that you can run to monitor that these engagements are happening. And as always, the content of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. So let’s start at the very beginning, because that’s a very good place to start. It all goes back to your data entry. We always use this philosophy at DonorPerfect. Bad data in is bad data out. So when it comes to tracking the donors that we’re engaging with or the tasks that we’re responsible for, all of that is done within the donor’s profile, and it’s done within the contact screen. So the contact data entry screen is all about tracking engagements that you’ve had with donors that have happened in the past, and engagements that you want to happen with the donor that are going to happen in the future. So it’s a way to see what’s been done with this donor and a way to plan or come up with a pipeline for how you want to engage them moving forward, everything as it relates to contact management in terms of automation, in terms of alerts, in terms of reporting, all comes back to how your contacts are entered into the program. So one of the ways that these contacts can be entered is on a manual basis, meaning that we can go into any donor record and create a contact to note that we either have engaged with this donor already, or we’re planning on engaging with them in the future. There’s a few key data entry points that we want to make sure I get captured within every contact record your due date, which is when do I want to complete this task by? And the completed date, which denotes the date that you completed the task. So it marks the contact as complete, so it can get removed from certain alerts. Activity is how we track the method of outreach. So am I calling this donor? Am I sending them a direct mail appeal? Am I inviting them to an event? Are we having an in person meeting that activity code denotes the way that we’re reaching out to the person and assigned to is how we create those to do lists. This is where we assign the task to a staff member so that they know they’re responsible for completing this telephone call by this date. So state. And once that touch point has happened, the contact notes is where our you can go in and actually capture the details or the notes about your engagement with the donor. So this is where Paul Jones has indicated that they spoke to this donor about becoming a board chair, if it’s a engagement where there’s some type of documentation that are being signed, or files that you think would be really great to have linked to this contact in the white ribbon next to the save button, you can attach a file to this contact. So if the donor had to sign something, we can have that documentation saved within DonorPerfect. You can even click on Add to Calendar so that if this is something that’s going to be happening in the future, you can put this contact on your personal calendar, so that you don’t even have to be logged in the DonorPerfect to see your upcoming touch points, but we will be talking about how DonorPerfect will alert you and create a to do list for you a little bit later on. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to navigate away from the PowerPoint, and I’m going to log into DonorPerfect and actually walk you through adding a contact manually. So give me one moment. We’re just going to go ahead and toggle over to my DonorPerfect system. And now, once I’m logged in, I go up into the top right corner where I find my Quick Search button. And this lets me search for the donor that I want to create a contact with. So I want to call Hugh Jackman, because he’s recently made a major gift to our organization. So I want to call him and thank him for his support, and also let him know about other ways that he can get involved. So I’m going to log into huge record. And 123, tabs over from the main data entry table, we have your contacts tab. This is where we’re going to see the past contacts and this is where I can create brand new ones as well. So just looking at the contact screen, I can see that we’ve engaged with Hugh Jackman pretty regularly through quite a few diverse channels. I’m going to come down and click Add Contact, which is on the right hand side, or, sorry, left hand side of the screen. And I’m going to fill out the details about when I want this contact to be completed by and my method of outreach. So my due date, I’m going to say I would like to complete this task by Friday. In the activity drop down, I’m going to pick from my list of donor outreach methods, major donor phone calls. I’m going to leave completed date blank because I haven’t yet completed this task. It’s something that will happen in the future. In assigned to I’m going to assign this to myself, so this becomes part of my to do list and in Contact Notes. I sometimes like to use this as a way to remind myself why I’m reaching out to this donor. I can clink, click, Insert today’s date, which is a little line that’s next to the contact notes box that will insert the date that I’m adding the note. I like to add my initials, and I can leave a note calling Hugh Jackman to thank him for his recent donation of $5,000 and. I’m going to speak to the impact and invite him to our upcoming Gala. So this is more of a note for myself to remind myself what it is that I’m planning on doing and what I’m looking to achieve when I reach out to Hugh Jackman, then I just click the Save button in the white ribbon, and now that contact transaction becomes a line item on my contact screen. And from here again, I can click on the little calendar icon in the grid because the completed date hasn’t yet been filled out. And I can add this to any one of the calendar providers listed here. So Apple, Google, office, 365, Outlook, both online and installed, and Yahoo, these are the calendar providers that integrate directly with DonorPerfect, for those of you that maybe have board members or other staff members that you want to involve in the conversation.

You can add this to your calendar and then invite that board member or invite that staff member to that calendar. Invite.

Alrighty, so I’m going to take a quick pause here in the chat, just let me know. Yes or No. Do I have any questions about the creation of contacts or anything as it relates to the definitions of the field?

Alrighty, I’m getting lots of no’s, which is good. So contact management is great, because if you are in the office and you know you want to essentially schedule out everything that you have to do in terms of your tasks, in terms of donor engagement, you can log into your DonorPerfect system, go through the database and create these contacts. Monica, yes, we will touch a little bit on Moves Management. Now. The other really nice part about DonorPerfect is, if you are out in the wild and you happen to interact with a donor, you can also record contact transactions using our free DP mobile app. So yes, DonorPerfect has a free mobile app that you can access on Android or on your Apple device. So you can just go into your app store and download the app DP mobile. And the true value of DP mobile is that it’s essentially contact management on the go. So if you are out in the wild and you have a meeting with a donor, or you just happen to run into them and you think, wow, I should record this in DonorPerfect. You can open up your app on your phone. It has the same Quick Search functionality that allows you to search for a constituent. It allows you to look at their profile. And when you’re looking at their profile, you can click on the Contacts button to view and also create contact transactions right on your mobile device.

So when you click to add the contact, you’re going to fill out the same exact details due date and completed date as the date that you completed this interaction activity code, which is the type of interaction and in the notes section or comments section, Gwen, the notes and comments section on the contact screen is where you enter the dated notes about your meeting with your donors. What I really love about the DP mobile app as well is that when you are working with the notes section on your mobile device, most modern devices now have a microphone icon that you can click on, and you can actually verbally dictate your notes, so you can speak your notes instead of having to type all of them out, which is great, because it’s a potentially a bit more accurate than typing on your phone. Yes, and again, this will all then get captured in DonorPerfect in that donor’s record. So VP mobile app, totally free app that I recommend everyone go ahead and download. It uses the same credentials that you use to log into your DonorPerfect system, and it allows you to do your contact management on the go. So with the creation of the contact records in DonorPerfect, and with the DP mobile app, I’ve been focusing a lot more on, I would say, the one to one interactions where we’re engaging with a donor one to one, usually with the goal of building a much more personal relationship. So these tend to be engagements that we have with major donors or mid level donors, or potentially new donors or monthly donors, depending on your role and size of your organization. 

Okay, so in addition to these one to one interactions, the contact management tool can also be used to track one to many interactions. So these can be things like I sent out a direct mail appeal, and I want to track who the recipients of that direct mail appeal were. This could be, we send out an email through constant contact and I want to see how many people opened up that constant contact email. This could be, we created an invitation list for our event, and we want to be able to monitor how many people have responded that they’re attending versus how many people indicated that they will not be attending. So all the functionalities that I’m talking about right now on this slide are cases where DonorPerfect will create contact transactions for you automatically and on a global scale, meaning that I can create contact records for hundreds to hundreds and hundreds of constituent records. The first is through our mailings and mail merge tool, which is used to manage any type of direct mail or snail mail communication. When you’re creating your direct mails, one of the things that you can click is the update contact manager button. That update contact manager button is what allows the mail merge tool to create contact transactions for everyone that’s on that mailing list, or it allows DonorPerfect to create a contact transaction for any donor who meets the filter criteria for your direct mail appeal. So the update contact manager creates the contact transaction. It fills in the activity code as mailing the due date and completed date as the date that you produce the file. You can also assign what’s called a mailing code, which is how you can track the name of the specific mailer that the donor received. So was this person a recipient of the spring appeal letter, or was this person a recipient of our board member letter?

Now for those of you that maybe have many people who are involved with contact management, and you may be a bit hesitant to give them access to DonorPerfect. So this could be people like board members who, if we can get them involved with our donor engagement efforts, can be very helpful in us building relationships. But we may not necessarily want to give them full access to DonorPerfect, but we still want to track that they’re interacting with donors. What we can do is we can create contact transactions for donors using importing so those board members could go into a Excel file, fill out the details about the engagement that they had. They can write in their notes, and then you guys can complete a weekly or monthly or BI monthly import of those contact records. It’s a little less common that I see people do this. But if you want a way to be able to track engagement without giving everybody access to DonorPerfect, importing is a great way to get those contacts created on mass. And we do have a contact import template in DonorPerfect that you can access. Constant Contact is becoming much more of a popular way to reach out with donors, because it’s an automated or mass marketing email in. Integration that we have. So every time you create lists in the Constant Contact integration, like a email list for monthly donors, an email list for first time donors, an email list for lapsed donors, or an email list for event attendees, whenever you send an email out to one of those lists, Constant Contact will then, on the contacts data entry table, create a contact transaction. The track that they that donor received in email through Constant Contact, it gets marked with the activity code, Constant Contact and the due date, or sorry, the completed date gets filled in when the donor opens the email. In addition to denoting in the activity field that it is a constant contact email, there’s an entire section on the contact screen called email campaign information that will actually tell you the name of the email that the donor received, it’ll denote the specific email it was sent to, and it’ll also indicate if that email bounced at all. So this is a great way to actually monitor how many of your constituents are actually opening your emails, so that you can tweak your email marketing strategy to fit your constituents preferences. And then, Monica, I know you had asked about Moves Management, yes, depending on your DonorPerfect package, some of you may have access to our Moves Management module. Essentially, what the Moves Management module allows you to do is come up with a engagement plan for a specific group of donors. So if we’re trying to raise money for a capital campaign and we really want to focus in on getting pledges from our major donor prospects, we can create a moves management plan where we identify the prospects that we want to solicit a pledge from, and we can come up with a series of engagements or touch points that we want to have happen with that group. And so each time we have a donor who completes one engagement, we mark the task as complete and then move them into the next engagement in the pipeline. So it’s essentially you coming in with a very clear vision and strategic plan on how you want to engage this group of donors. And then as people move through that pipeline, as we move them through the plan, we’re able to monitor where each constituent is in that plan.

Again, depending on your package, you may also have access to our events management module. So our events management module essentially allows you to create invitation lists for your events, and whenever someone is included on that invitation list, Events Management creates a contact transaction for you, and you’re able to monitor that we invited this person to the event, we can see the name of the event, and we can monitor their response status to see whether we’re waiting to hear back if they’re attending. We can see whether they have purchased their tickets, or we can see if they’ve declined to attend. The goal in all of this is that we want to be able to track every engagement that we’ve had with all of our donors, because eventually we can start taking that data and analyzing how successful we are in our engagement efforts, and potentially also start to get some valuable insight into our donor base In terms of which forms of communication specific donors prefer. If we realize one donor always responds to direct mail but never ever opens a constant contact email, then that’s a valuable data point that we can make a note of in their profile. We should only really solicit them and communicate with them through direct mail, because our data suggests that’s their preferred method, alrighty. So let me just take a look here. I see a couple questions coming into the chat. So Gwen, the contact comment section is, if you want to track notes about the specific interaction that you had with a donor. So if you have a phone call or a meeting with a donor, the contact Notes section is where you want to put the detailed notes about that interaction. If you want to record a note that’s more specific about the donor themselves, you would put that in the next. Narrative field, which is on the main page of the donor’s profile. So narrative is more about recording notes that are specific about that donor, that you think everyone should be aware of. Contact notes is about the details about the specific interaction you had with that donor at that point in time. So and then, Jan, if a donor has previously opted out of Constant Contact, is this overwritten and sends them anyway, or is that contact method lost when they opt out? So Jan, if a donor eventually opts out of Constant Contact, we don’t delete their contact history. You’re able to still see every contact that they’ve received. What happens is, on the main page of the donor profile, they get marked as do not send email through Constant Contact, and when that check box is selected, that is what prevents them from getting any additional emails through Constant Contact.

Alrighty, so now that we have a pretty strong grasp on the Different ways that we can manage our donor engagements so we can create contact records one by one within the donor’s profile. We can use DP mobile to create contact transactions on the fly. We can use Mail Merge, importing Constant Contact Moves Management and events management to create more automated global donor touch point. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the tools that can be very helpful in facilitating the contact management tools. The first is code maintenance. If we review the contact data entry screen. One of the things that you’ll notice is that the contact data entry screen is very drop down coded field heavy, which means you click in a drop down box and you’re choosing one value from that list. So when we click in the activity field, we’re choosing either phone call, direct mail, Twitter or meeting over we’re in the Assigned To field. We’re assigning it to Amanda tedrinsky or Sean patero or Sarah Lalonde. So code maintenance is how you can add new values to those drop down fields so you can make sure that all of your methods of outreaches are being captured, and all of your staff who are involved with contact management are represented in the activity field. Another helpful tool when it comes to contact management is that you can actually edit the contact entry screen grid, so when you’re looking at a donor’s profile at their contact data entry table, you can pick and choose the data that summarizes their engagement with that donor. I’ll show you that in just a moment, and then I did highlight this already. We do have our calendar integration, where, if the contact is set to happen in the future, you can click on the calendar icon and add that contact to your personal calendar so that you don’t have to do and manage everything and donorperfect, we can also see it on our personal calendar devices. Alrighty. So let’s take a look at the code maintenance component of this first so again, the purpose of code maintenance is really so that when you guys are coming in and doing the data entry work for your contacts, whether it’s through importing manual entry DP mobile or you’re potentially using one of our global contact management tools. The purpose of code maintenance is the ability for you guys to add values to these drop down lists, so that when you want to report on your contact management efforts, we know how many times we’ve reached out to donors through group emails versus how many people received our capital campaign direct mail assigned to can help you pull reports that help you see which staff members have completed their task and which staff members still have tasks that are needing to be completed. So every single one of these drop down fields is accompanied by a plus sign. Which means that you have the ability to add a code or add a value to the drop down list. So for example, if I wanted to add a code called major donor discovery call, so if someone’s identified as a major donor prospect, I may want to call them and just get to know them a little bit more, and through that conversation determine, do I think that they’re a good fit to move forward with major donor engagement? So if I want to add a value to that drop down box, like major donor discovery call, I can click on the plus sign next to the activity field on this contact screen, and in the pop up window I like to go to Manage codes. The reason I like to go to Manage codes is it allows me to see how other people have historically created the values in those drop down boxes, so I can be consistent when I create my new value. So if we look at my two major donor codes. I have the code description. This is what I see in my data entry, and I also have a code name. So the code description, major donor impact story, major donor phone call is front facing. It’s for you guys. The data entry text, MD, impact MD. Phone is the code name. This is used by DonorPerfect, the computer program so that it can interpret and use this data when it builds filters, or if you’re importing data into the contact screen, you always import using the code name. So I’m going to ask you guys to help me out here. If I want to create a new code for major donor discovery call in the chat, what would you call the code description and what would you call the code name to be consistent with what we see on the screen here, and remember the code description is what I have the green check mark next to the Code name has the gold stars. So in the chat, how would you code major donor discovery? Call you?

All right, let’s see, all right. Ben Parker, I agree. And Diane, I also think your setting is good as well. So yes, Monica, okay, yes. So Ben, Diane, Monica, each one of you have slight variations on the code name, but I think all of those would fit within matching how I’ve created my codes in the past and my code descriptions. So if I add a new call, or if I add a new code, I mean, for my description, I’m going to do major donor colon discovery call, because all of my codes for major donors has had the word major donor at the front a colon, and then the method of outreach for the code name, all of my major donor codes have started with MD, major donor. And then we can get into do I want the code to be just discovery? Do I want it to be D, i, s, c, phone, any one of these kind of variations on the code will work. The most important piece for me is that they all start with MD, that when I need to pull these in a report or a filter, they will all be grouped together because our filters and our reports always group data alphabetically, which is why I recommend making your codes and your descriptions kind of match each other, so that they’ll be grouped together in reports and filtering so.

Alrighty. So now I have a major donor discovery call activity code, so now I can track how many major donors I have set that I need to call them and learn more about their interests and see if they’re a good fit for future major donor communication, or if they’re even interested in our organization for potentially major giving.

Now in terms of the other piece that I think is a really cool tool to be aware of is the ability to customize what you see when you look at the contacts table of a donor’s record, because you can customize the columns of data that you’re seeing on this data entry screen. A very common one that I see is that I have clients who will have constant contact campaign listed in the activity field, and they want to be able to see what was the name of the campaign or the email that the donor received. So these columns can be customized. Now keep in mind they are customized globally. So that means every single person who uses DonorPerfect is going to have these same columns that so you cannot customize these columns on a user ID basis. It is every user in DonorPerfect has the same view. To customize this, all you have to do is come up into the right hand corner where it says, modify columns, and you can pick up to 10 values to appear in the grid. You cannot add more than 10 in the second column of the grid. Position is how you can assign the order that you want the columns to appear, left to right. And if you are adding drop down coded fields like activity by whom mailing code I would always recommend clicking display description, so it’ll show the code description and not the code name. So for me, if I wanted to add the constant contact email name I would click in an open drop down box and click em underscore, campaign parentheses, campaign name. This is going to be the name of the constant contact email that was sent out and I’m going to swap that with event ID. I’m going to make Constant Contact campaign, position six, event ID, position seven, and so on and so forth. I’m going to use the position column, which is the third column in the grid to reorder my contacts. You can also here change how your contacts are sorted, so I’m going to set it so that my contacts are always sorted by the due date.

So when is the next task do, and then you just hit save, and now it’s going to have all of my contacts sorted by what is the next task that needs to be completed. I now have a column for campaign name, so that if I find a constant contact campaign, it’s going to tell me that they received the Untitled email campaign created on 2020 30705 we’re not very creative with our names here, unfortunately. So this changes that I applied will apply to every contact screen that I go to. So if I go to the Joseph Bag of Donuts, donor record, and I go to his contacts data entry table. I’m going to see that now his contacts are also sorted by the due date. So the next task that needs to be done is. He’s getting a mailer, and I can see every email that he’s received. Okay, yes, Monica, we haven’t gotten to the reporting side yet, so I think the next piece is going to be super exciting for you. So I wanted to show you how to modify the columns, because when we’re working with donors, one on one, it’s nice to be able to, when you look in the donor’s profile, quickly be able to find the information you’re looking for. But I have a hunch that a good chunk of you are wanting some reports or lists that you can pull to see the tasks that you have upcoming for all of your donors. So let’s move into talking about alerts and reminders and reports. So reminders and reports are how DonorPerfect helps you stay on top of your upcoming tasks, because you guys are busy, and I’m sure many of you are wearing multiple different hats and having to do multiple different roles in your nonprofit, and I’m sure contact management is just one small part of that role and responsibility. So if we could take advantage of DonorPerfect as kind of a assistant, if you will, it can help us make sure that we are following up with our donors in a timely manner. So one of those reminders and reports is our homepage or our scheduled donor outreach, you’ll hear me use those terms interchangeably. Homepage, scheduled donor outreach. The scheduled donor outreach is really meant to be a way for you to have a to do list for this week. These are every donor contact transaction that has been assigned to your username through the Assigned To field, and it’s going to be everything that is either past due, so you haven’t completed it yet, due for today or due in the next seven days. Now this cannot be customized that seven day time frame is hard coded, because it’s really meant to be your to do list for this week, everything that you need to complete over the next seven days. Now, of course, some of you may like to be able to have a larger view, where you want to be able to know who are all of my donors that I need to touch base with this month, or who are all my donors that I need to touch base with next month? So if you want something that’s more focused on being able to see your upcoming touch points into the future, contact listing and contact calendar are going to be your go to reports, contact listing and contact calendar and homepage. These are all features that are included in every DonorPerfect package, so everybody that is on this call today can take advantage of these three tools. I will add to that as well export templates. Everyone here also has access to export templates, which is a way for you to build a custom contact management report. Everybody has the ability to create this custom report that gets downloaded to excel, where you get to pick the data points that you’re interested in reporting on, and it’ll dump that data into Excel for you.

And then easy reports is a custom report writer, where you can build a custom report inside of DonorPerfect. Now the one nuance is not every DonorPerfect package includes the custom, easy Report Builder, so you will want to reach out to your account manager if you’re unsure if this is included in your package. And then DP mobile we’ve already talked about. DP mobile also has a report that will show you your upcoming donor touchpoint.

Alrighty, so what we’re going to do is I want to focus in on the pieces that everybody has access to so I’m going to focus in on homepage, contact listing. Those are going to be my two pieces that I’m going to demo for you guys today. So for homepage, the way that the homepage works is that either you. Or someone else is going into DonorPerfect, and they are creating a contact record, and for it to appear on the home page, the contact has to be due either today, within the next seven days, or it has to be past due. So the due date needs to be either today’s date within the next seven days or in the past. The completed Date field also has to be empty to indicate that this contact has not been marked as complete. And again, we do our activity code to define the method of outreach and assign to this is how DonorPerfect knows whose scheduled donor outreach to put this contact on. So I can assign this task to myself, or I can assign this task to another staff member for demonstration purposes. I’m going to assign it to myself once the contact is saved. Now, if I go into the task bar and I go to the Home icon.

On the home page, I have my fundraising goals, and if I scroll a little bit past the screen, this is my scheduled donor outreach. So obviously I have not been a very good fundraiser because I’m quite behind on the donors that I’m supposed to be touching base with. These are all of my past due touch points that I haven’t completed, or I just haven’t marked them as complete in DonorPerfect this week will show me everything that’s due in the next seven days, and if you have anything due today that will be its own group. Now what I love about scheduled donor outreach is if I want to follow up with Hugh Jackman, he gets one of my major donor phone calls. I can click View Details next to his name, and that lets me read the note that I left myself. It gives me his phone number and a little bit of information about is giving history. So on the right hand side of the screen, I can see he’s been a donor for three years. He’s given us 42 donations. I could even go to his donor profile if I want to look up more information ahead of calling him once I’ve actually completed the interaction, I can click the MARK as Done button, and that will automatically fill in the completed date for me. So once that completed date gets filled in, the contact will get removed from my scheduled donor outreach. I can also add additional notes about the interaction that I had with Hugh Jackman. I can insert the date and add my detailed notes about the contact and any plans to follow up. Once that’s saved, you can even schedule a follow up task so ask so I can schedule that. Now I’ve done a major donor phone call with Hugh Jackman, so the next thing that I’m going to do is a major donor impact story, and I’m going to send that on September 10, because I want to give a little bit of leeway between this touch point and the next touch point so I’m not over engaging with this donor, and now I can save this task, and that will remove Hugh Jackman from my to do list.

So again, schedule donor outreach? Yes, so Monica is correct. Scheduled donor outreach will only show you tasks that are seven days out or are due for today or were due in the past. Yes, so Monica and anyone else that’s on this call. If you want to pull a list of constituents, or if you want to pull a list of touch points that are more than seven days out, that’s when you have to go to the reporting options. So easy reports and export templates let you build a more custom report option if you want something that’s out of the box that you can run literally right on this webinar or right when you get off this webinar in reports and in Report Center. And I apologize. I just like to check the time real quick to make sure I am on track. So if you want a out of the box contact management report that you can run literally right now, you can go to Reports and Report Center, and over on the left hand side of the screen where you have all of your report folders, you’re going to choose the other reports folder. The other reports folder has two contact management reports, contact listing and contact calendar, both reports run in the exact same way. The only difference in the two is the way that the data is presented contact calendar, pardon me, contact calendar is going to take all of your upcoming contacts and put them onto a calendar for you. So it’s just like if you had a calendar up on your wall to see I have a doctor’s appointment on this day, and I have my kids basketball game on this day. That’s what the contact calendar does for you. The contact listing is going to give you a just straight list of contacts that are due. So both reports are run in the exact same way. It’s just a matter of, do you prefer a physical calendar or do you prefer a itemized list? Me, personally, I much prefer the list format, so I’m going to run contact listing. Okay, so here’s the part where you get to say I would like to pull this report for a more than seven day period on run items due or on before. This is where you can say, show me all of the open donor touch points that are due on or before this date. So if I want to go a month from today’s date, I can say, show me everything that is scheduled to be completed up until October, not October, September, 13. I don’t know times or dates, apparently. So this is you defining essentially the date range that you want to see open contacts for now, the default is that the contact listing and contact calendar report will exclude any items that are completed. If you want to include your completed items, because you want to make sure that your colleagues are completing their tasks, you can click the box Include completed items, and that will show you open items and items that have been finished. The sort order is how you can sort the data in the report. So do you want to sort it alphabetically by the donor’s name? Do you want to sort it by the date of the contact, or do you want to sort by another field of your choice? And then lastly, you can come in and you can decide, do you want to view the open contacts for just your user ID, or do you want to run it for all user IDs, which will show you all staff members open touch points? So I’m going to do all user ID so I can see what my colleagues have coming up. If you want to only look at one specific colleague, you can set a selection filter and build a filter that says, pull all of the records from the contact data entry table and. Where the Assigned To field is equal to and then you would choose the name of the colleague that you wanted to pull the list for. But I would like to see everyone’s tasks, so I’m going to do all user ID. So I’m going to click View listing, which is at the very bottom of the report. And this is going to show me, here are all of my open tasks. So when you guys look at this report, I’m going to have you right into the chat. When you guys look at this report, what information does this report give you that you think could be helpful in your managing, your contact management efforts? So is there anything in this report that you think is helpful? 

Uh, Monica says the phone number, yep. So if you are doing phone as a method of outreach, which based off the activity column. I’m doing a lot of phone calls, that’s very helpful to have that phone number. Diane says everything, the summary, the phone the due date exactly, so we know when the task is due. The activity tells us how we’re reaching out. The name tells us who it is we’re reaching out to. Phone number gives us a way to reach out to them, especially if it is a phone conversation by whom, tells us who’s responsible for the task and the comment section, if we’ve left comments for our colleagues, so they know why they’re reaching out. It’s a nice way to see what was why we’re supposed to be reaching out to this person. I like Diane. It’s a one stop shop, and that’s so convenient, exactly. It’s one place with most of the information you would probably need. And again, if you need some additional details, you always have the option to do export templates or easy reports as a way to build a more custom version of this, but at least let this be your baseline to say here’s some suggested data points that you may want to include on your custom reports. First, I don’t have time to talk about the custom reporting today, but if that’s an option that you’re interested in learning more about, you can check out our export to file webinar, or easy reports webinar, or just reach out to our support team, and they can give you some guidance as well.

Alrighty, and because I’m all about participation, what ideas is we’re going to use the chat? What ideas do you have for how you’re going to start using the contact management tools? So are you guys going to start running those reports like the contact listing? Are you going to take advantage of homepage? Are you really excited to start adding some new codes to your contact screen? What ideas are you kind of brewing in your head that you’re going to try to take from today and apply in your day to day efforts? Monica adding contacts to calendars? Yes, absolutely, I live and die by my Work calendar. So it’s always nice to be able to see everything that I’m planning on doing. Ben also agrees with adding the context to the calendar, absolutely and the activity list. Yes, we love being able to have reports as well.

All righty, oh. Sarah says, I’m excited to try out the app. Oh, I’m so excited for you. Sierra, yes, it’s a really cool and fun app. There’s some other nice things that you can do with it. But for contact management, it’s really, really helpful, alrighty. So just to recap what we have gone over for today. Ultimately, when it comes to contact management, it’s all about documenting. You want to document every interaction that you’ve had, or any interaction that you want to happen in the future, so that it’s really easy to pull reports and create audit trails of what’s been done. We know that turn over in the nonprofit industry is quite large, so when we create these contacts, we’re creating a legacy. So. So that if we ever decide to move on because we win the lottery, or we realize we are have a rich uncle who gave us an inheritance, you can leave behind those details for the next person to pick up where you’ve left off. The homepage can be your way to monitor your upcoming task what you absolutely need to get done this week. But also take advantage of the reports that are in the Report Center, because that can be your way to see your touch points that are set to happen into the future. And also take advantage of the free mobile app so that you can stay up to date and on top of your donor touch points, even while you’re on the go, and always make sure that that you are filling in that completed date, so that you can close tasks and remove them From reports and remove them from the homepage. All righty. So with that said, that is going to be the end of our content that we had planned today. I hope you guys are all walking away with some new knowledge, which it sounds like from the chat you are. If you have any questions, totally feel free to check out the knowledge base or reach out to support. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to work with you guys today, and I hope I get to see you in some future webinars. Bye.