Action Best Practice

erin russell

Good Afternoon all -


I was wondering if anyone would be willing to share any manuals or procedures their orgs use for Actions?


In my org. there is no procedure for use of actions, and only a few members of the team use them consistently. We have a lot of the general public in our large data base due to the type of org we are, and i am starting to feel that actions can be used down to our lower level membership donors....but before i implement any big change and put more information into the data base i would be curious to see what others do.


Thanks to anyone willing to share

Nicole S

There has been some chatter on the forums about this in the past, so you may want to search around old posts as well.


I think of actions (versus notes) as interactions with the constituent. So calls, meetings, communications, deadlines... Notes are really more like general information. Actions are more search/reportable and solicitors can be assigned to them unlike notes.


One thing that I have found to be important is that everyone needs to be using the same definitions or logic. For instance, I once fond out that certain actions were being considers one type by some users and another type by others. Definitely needed some more clarity. Don't have too many options. I've seen users want a certain action type or something, when really and existing type would suffice.


Are there any particular issues or areas of concern that you already know about?