contact or call reports

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Tracy Forkin
Tracy Forkin ✭
Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We are exploring easier, more efficient ways to get the data from our contact reports in Raiser's Edge. These are added as actions but the report may contain information that needs to be updated in others areas. I would love to hear how users are doing this. Are you entering these one-by-one? Do you use import? Do you ask gift officers to complete a form? My hope is to create a form which will allow me to import the data into Raiser's Edge. However, I am not sure how to do this when information is being imported to more than one tab.
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  • Ryan Hyde
    Ryan Hyde ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    It isn't possible to have a single import bring information in to multiple tabs. In fact, depending on what kind of data you're importing, you may need multiple imports for information that exists on a single tab. 


    So, what tabs are you looking to deal with, apart from actions? I'm assuming some mix of attributes and notes. If that's the case, then your import files will be fairly simple, but you will need a separate one for each of the three information types (actions, attributes, notes). That shouldn't bee too hard to accomplish though. Just make sure you have a constituent ID number for every record, and then you can slice and dice your data however you need to get it into the system.


    When I was first learning about the intracies of importing, I relied heavily on chat support. The folks there were very patient and knowledgeable and were willing to troubleshoot things with me until I got it right. 
  • Ryan Hyde
    Ryan Hyde ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    [something happened and my post got posted twice - this can be deleted]
  • Christine Cooke 2
    Christine Cooke 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    I have always trained the development team members to enter their own call/contact report info into Actions.  And additional info into Notes.  Anything beyond that, like phone/address/attributes/noting a death in the family and gifts of course, are entered by the data person/team.
  • Michelle Kolak
    Michelle Kolak ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    Tracy Forkin:

    We are exploring easier, more efficient ways to get the data from our contact reports in Raiser's Edge. These are added as actions but the report may contain information that needs to be updated in others areas. I would love to hear how users are doing this. Are you entering these one-by-one? Do you use import? Do you ask gift officers to complete a form? My hope is to create a form which will allow me to import the data into Raiser's Edge. However, I am not sure how to do this when information is being imported to more than one tab.

    We use ImportOMatic for imports, which allows us to import to several tabs at once.  I no longer have to break the file up or create import IDs outside of RE.  I have several excel templates that poeple can use to enter the data or I can customize an import to match the data file. 


    This has been helpful when there are many actions/updates that need to be done, but we sort of have a rule that if there are less than 20, they should be doing them manually in real time.

  • Jennifer Broadwell
    Jennifer Broadwell ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    Christine Cooke:

    I have always trained the development team members to enter their own call/contact report info into Actions.  And additional info into Notes.  Anything beyond that, like phone/address/attributes/noting a death in the family and gifts of course, are entered by the data person/team.

    Christine-do you guys have a policy on what is entered into an action and what goes into a note?  I have been in my role for about 10 months now, so I'm relatively new to RE but not to fundraising.  My thought was to have them enter their details in actions but if there is something overall that is important to note on the person, to enter that info also as a regular note. This was because if someone is trying to find one key piece of info, it's easier to look for it in notes than scroll through tons of actions.


    But, staff have been so confused on what goes where, and we have a lot of things that in the past that were entered in notes instead of actions.  Any suggestions on how to streamline this?  I'd rather just have them go to one place.

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