Regular report on changes made in Raiser's Edge?

Natalie Bousquet

Does anyone do a regular report of all of the work being done in Raiser's Edge? If so, what pieces of information do you like to look at?

Currently, I do a monthly breakdown of constituents added by code, changes to email/address, additions of links and social media accounts, breakdown of gift records, what note types were added, participants etc.

Ray Bergman

Moving this topic to the Raiser's Edge community

Austen Brown

Hi @Natalie Bousquet - I complete monthly maintenance on my system of all data added or changed in the previous month - there are about 150+ queries in this review. I have included a high-level list of what I review, below:

• Action Records
• Addressee/Salutation
• Address Records
• Appeal Records
• Attributes
• Consent Records
• Constituent Codes
• Constituent Info (Bio1/Org1 Tab, Primarily)
• Deceased Constituents
• Email
• Event Participant Records
• Gift Records
• Note Records
• Phones
• Proposal Records
• Receipt Status
• Relationship Records
• Solicitor Assignment Changes
• Suspected Duplicates

If you would like a more detailed list, send me a direct message with your email.

Daniel R. Snyder

@Austen Brown do you run all these 150+ queries manually or are they part of dashboards in database view?

Austen Brown

I run them manually, it takes me 3-4 hours. I have recently started to review the list and see which areas I could build out into automated flows.

Valerie Nguyen

Hi Austen,

We are about to implement RE NXT and assessing our data quality & integrity. I'd like a more details list. Would you kindly share your list? Thank you in advance. My email address is vnguyen@csudh.edu.

Warmest regards,

Valerie

Natalie Bousquet

Austen this is great! I'll send a message.

Would love to know too if anyone automates their process and how. I haven't had luck with dashboards as they don't seem to focus on constituent info itself.

JoAnn Strommen

LOL when I saw 150+ I thought you've got to be kidding!


You must feel it's worth the time. So if you're looking at changed data, what's your reference to know if it is correct or incorrect? Can you share what kind of things you would find in an Action review? From my perspective I have to assume what the DO entered is what they meant. So you see a phone # has been changed/added, are you researching the changes? I find a number of changes are typos made by the constituent him/herself when registering/donating online.


Even the part of the list of queries you shared is daunting IMO! You go girl!

Austen Brown

Hi @JoAnn Strommen - The review queries are to make sure that our standards for data entry are being up-held; this could be from information my team enters into the system or information brought in from online gifts. The monthly review grows every time I find an inconsistency that could be repeated elsewhere in the system or when I finish a long-term cleanup project and I want to make sure the standard is being maintained moving forward. When I started at my current org 6 years ago there were only a handful of queries I checked monthly.

Some examples of what I review:

• If an action has the status of “Completed” then the “Is it complete” box needs to be checked; this also helps prevent the action from appearing as ‘Past Due’ in web view.
• If a phone has been marked as “DNC” or is given a type implies it is not active, the “Inactive” box needs to checked.
• If an email has a common typo, it needs to be verified as being a valid email. I run these emails through an email validator to ensure it is correct and put a specific phrase in the comment section; if the email is not valid and has an obvious typo like “.comm" instead of “.com” I can fix it before we try to send them a message.

Leonie Smalling

@Austen Brown I would love to know how you do this. I am in the early stages of implementing a data quality dashboard and this would be really helpful. Thanks in advance

Austen Brown

@LEONIE ANSELL - Check out this webinar I was on. We talked through how to get started with clean-up/data maintenance and explained some real-world data clean-up projects I've done, as well as 20 queries I look at each week.