Action Attributes - Proposal

Ben Rymer 2

Hello,

Happy Friday! Wondering if anyone is willing to share their apprroach to using RE Action Attrbiutes, specifically relating to Actions linked to Proposals. I have some ideas about the table values I want to use, but am interested to know of different ways to use this table.

Thanks in advance!

 

Chris Nungesser

That's a good question, Ben Rymer‍. My organization has not used Attributes much in the past and it's something I've been thinking a lot of about recently. (We use Action Type more with our proposals). So you've definitely got me interested here. I'd love to hear what you're thinking. I'll try to brainstorm with you, if I can. 


Just speaking more generally, to set up a new field like this, I would sit down with my gift officer(s) and/or the head of fundraising. These conversations aren't technically at all. We just talk plainly (I'll figure out the technical aspects later). Instead, I like to focus on what it is that we want to know or do. Like what do we want to be able to do with this field? What do we want to report on? How are we going to use that information once we have it? Understanding that helps me work backwards from what do we want to know to how are we going to do it. So for this one, I'd start with: what is it that your team wish they knew about their prospects/proposals/cultivation process/etc?


For most fields, I prefer to use a Table (or maybe a Number field). If you have to pull data and build reports, then you already know what I'm getting at. And it's that Text fields have their place, but they make reporting much more difficult. Thinking about a table, my rule of thumb is: let's create a many values/options as we need and as a few as possible. We want to be specific with our values, but not so specific that the drop down menu is crazy cluttered. Or not so specific that there are too many options for us to pull together a meaningful report. Any value/table entry that we know we'll only use once should probably be given a second thought. Too broad is no good either. If we're so broad that we can't glean useful information from the fields, then we we're not going to know much more than we did before we used the field.


Those are just some rough thoughts. Hope something here resonates with you and is helpful.


Good luck.


Chris