Trip/Visit Reports

Janice Hackett

Does anyone have a procedures document or a standard template that the Development Officers use for entering visit reports into Raisers Edge?  

Tom Klimchak

We require our development officers to submit everything through Actions.  They have to include ONE action note on each visit.  The "short version" (255 characters) of the action needs to be entered into the Description line of the note.  That's what shows on reports.  It shows important, pertinant info.  


Example:  "Met with Jack for dinner and discussed his love of science. Mentioned science scholarship and he was interested in seeing more. Will schedule tour of science building soon."


In the Notes area they can write as much as they want.  That generally doesn't show up on reports, though our Prospect Research department does scan them for any pertinent info that needs to be coded (job / relationship changes, wealth ratings, etc).


Does that help or are you looking for more details?

Janice Hackett:

Does anyone have a procedures document or a standard template that the Development Officers use for entering visit reports into Raisers Edge?  

 

Peter Gulka 3

Tom knows what's what. 


If left to their own devices, fundraisers generally fall into 2 camps - the super verbose folks, and the ones that don't type enough. Contact reports need to be concise, so that they can be reported on, but most importantly need to be actionable. We don't need a novel.

• Define the audience - they are not writing these for themselves, they are writing them for hte person who is going to be working wit hthis prosepct after they leave becasue they have won the lottery/been hit by a bus. That will change the kind of detail they add, because it ahs to be explicit.
• Crate a checklist template - I think you can do this with default sets in RE, but in the Notes section you can create prompts for them to fill in such as "Who did I meet with?, "What was the outcome?", "What is the next step?". They litterally just answer the quesitons and fill in the form. 

Janice Hackett

I
thought you’re ideas were great.   Just wondering, how do
you set up the Note section with prompts?

 

 

Peter Gulka 3

A couple of ways may be possible. 

1. Default sets - these are keyboard shortcuts you can set up to preload fields in RE. I can't remember off the top of my head if this would work with Action Notes but they are in general a useful and underutilized feature, so worth checking out anyway. Just search for "default sets" in the Knowledgebase.
2. VBA script - if you have RE:Enterprise, or have purchased the API, you can create scripts in VBA that enforce business rules, such as adding questions into the notes section when a new action is created. You may not have access to this. Again, search in the Knowledgebase.
3. Shortkeys (https://www.shortkeys.com/) - a little software package you can install that connects keyvoard shortcuts you define to pre-determined blocks of text. Realy handy for standard email reply language, but in the context you could set it up for your fundraisers and say something like "When you start a new contact report, put the cursor in the notes field and hit ctrl-shift-N" or something like that. Default sets and ShortKeys do kind of the same thing.