Account Phone Fields no longer allow text

Laura Cooper

In many of our historical records, we have put alphabetic text in the phone fields, for example to indicate which spouse's mobile number. That appears no longer allowed.

Now if there is long-existing text in the phone field and one is making changes in the Persona tab to any field, eTap will not save on account the phone entry is invalid. Not sure any benefit of restricting character type or length. Please change it back!

Joshua Nederhood

Hi Laura,


To piggyback on your concern, I have found that the phone fields also currently only allow 10-digit phone numbers, which does not work for my organization as we have many international phone numbers which, including the country codes, may be up to 11 or 12 digits long.


When I contacted Blackbaud support, they recommended creating a user-defined field for non-standard phone numbers, which would have less restrictions on what we could put there. This is not an ideal workaround, since it creates an extraneous field and wouldn't allow phone numbers to be in the same column of a report. Ideally, I think the phone fields should be relaxed to include up to 15 or so digits, including country codes with plus signs and extensions with commas or star symbols. However, I would caution against including much alphabetic text in your phone fields, Laura. Indicating who should have what number seems like something you should use joint accounts, personas,

and defined fields for.