Recording of incoming emai/mail/phone communicaitions

Simon Carr 2

I am after some best practise advise in the use of Actions (or Notes) for the recording of incoming emails, phone calls, letters etc. We are hosted so have the limitations of this for MS Outlook integration.



I am wondering how you differentiate between incoming and outgoing communications? using the Action type perhaps? But then do you create a long list of action types to indicate which area of the organsisation the communicaion relates to? One list of all types of incoming and then all types of outgoing by team?



Or maybe use Notes for incoming and Actions for outgoing? But then what if an in-comming email requires a follow up action?



Any ideas and thoughts most welcome



Thanks

Simon

Marissa Flynn

If the information is related to a specific Action (phone call, meeting, email) then it should be a action regardless of incoming or outgoing. Any direct touch point/interaction goes on Actions. Not sure why you would need to differentiate between incoming and outgoing, because our work does not need that differentiation, but you could always use an attribute if that was something important to track.



For us, Notes track important information/details about a constituent. It often times is biological info or history on a record. 



In regards to Action Types, we have about 15 options most of which relate to our specific needs/programs. In building these, we asked what information would we want to pull out and how did I want my reporting to work. We then cleaned up the Table and added Types based on desired outcomes. I will say, that Action/Notes Types are constantly evolving for us and we are also adding/adjusting to suit our needs. 

Christine Robertson

The only time when I would include communication on the Constituent Note tab is if it directly affects your organization's overall relationship with that individual/organization (ie: request for DNS/DNM, conversation notes that explain their relationship to your org, their preferences regarding gift designations, etc.) Beyond that, conversations, emails and any other communications are, in my mind, Actions and should be tracked as such.  You can add notes and attributes to Actions themselves, so that way, all communications can easily be attributed to Solicitors, included in reports and organized.



I believe that Constituent Notes are the most wrongly used feature of RE.  Too much valuable information ends up there and becomes all but un-useable in that format.  Specifically define for your organization what should (and should not) go there and beat your drum until you get consistency (or until you move to Tahititi - whichever comes first!!).  

John Heizer

ARGH!  Typed up a long message, so long that the system timed out and when I clicked on "Post" it gave an error and lost everything.  So, let me try again.



In addition to the great advice so far I'll add my 2 pence.



Keep Action Types to a bare minimum needed for extracting reports, and use Security to lock down the types so folks don't add things willy-nilly.  I'm not exagerating (much  ) when I say I've seen table entries like "Bob's 42nd Birthday" which will never be used again.  Same goes for the Notepad Types.



The Sample Database is a good place to see examples of types that might be needed and how they can be used for reporting.



Also, when I've inherited a database where Actions weren't being used well and Notes abused, I have gone into Configuration and changed the Notepad Type from "Call Report" to "Call Report - THIS SHOULD BE AN ACTION" (and disabled that type) as a not-so-subtle hint.

Simon Carr 2

Thanks for all the feedback. I completely agree about the difference between notes and actions. I only put that out there as I had seen it done in another organisation. I think I need to look at a list of actions types that negates the need to show if it is incoming or outgoing. cheers.

Jen Claudy

I've done the same as John (both recently lost a really long reply to an error on the page and changed Notepad Types to "Phone Call - MOVE TO ACTION").  We've been getting better about this, in general, but the good news is that in NXT, Actions and Notes are in the same tile (although you can select to view only one or the other, if desired).  This makes sense to me, because every database I've worked in has had some level of this issue.