RE7 and RE NXT Best Practices for Utilizing Actions and Prepping for NXT

A  few of the action types we use are:  Identification, Recognition, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship.    Phone call, email would go under what kind of action?/category. 


Beth Gibney:

We currently do not use actions in RE.  In the past they were used inconsistently.  We have already gone through the process of closing out old action items so that we can start with a clean slate. 


I am looking for ideas on what categories to use for the drop downs (phone call, email, etc).  Is there a best practice for this? 


Any tips or tricks since we are preparing for NXT and starting to use actions?


Suggestions on trainings for my team to take since they have never used actions? 

Hi Beth.


Great question. Personally, I think that after donor contact details, and gift history, actions are the next most important part of the donor record because we want to know what contact we have had with a donor so we can monitor attrition, retention, address changes, etc and make sure we are not over or under communicating with groups of donors.


I recently did a clean up of our actions as we had almost 100 action types, including some duplicates because we could never find what we wanted. For example we have them for lots of different stages of our regular giving programme such as sending welcome letters, newsletters, welcome calls, following up missed payments by phone, letter, and then donor actions such as increase gift amount, decrease amount, skip payments, etc. The status is then the outcome of the contact e.g. disconnected number, successful upgrade, or for many actions it is just "Completed". This makes it really easy to get an overview of donor contact from their action screen without having to open any actions and it is also easy to report on actions.


Because we have a number of teams and they all have actions specific to them I have prefaced the action type with a code for the team - RG for Regular Giving, DM for Direct Marketing etc, and we have an ALL category at the top for action types used by everyone (Change of address etc). Then the whole list is sorted alphbetically.


We also use default sets a lot to quickly record common phone calls and donor contact and I have grouped these too so the most popular are at the top and then the others are by teams or functions e.g. we have actions set up to notify certain people if a donor requests say bequest information. The feedback for team members is that this is really helpful. Unfortunately, because you cannot actually MOVE or REORDER default sets I had to recreate them all from scratch so it took most of a day to sort this all out. I have created blank default sets to act as headings (with a row of hyphens before and after the name) and also left some blanks in each section (with a series of periods as name place holders) so if I want to add more later I do not need to recreate everything again.


Also we decided that because we had specific action types, we do not need specific notepad types so reduced this list (which tended to recreate the action types) to just "Notes" and each of the action categories in case on donor contact involved various forms of communication.


So I recommend thinking about the types of things you want to record with actions and how specific you want to be. Rembmer it is easier to report on dropdowns than free text but you could also use action attribute if you need to, we tend not to. Also think about who will use which types. Use a naming convention for the action types but try not to replicate the contact method (phone call, mail etc) because this is already captured in the action category. Also consider what actions your organisation adds most often and create default sets for these to make it fast to add them. And like Bob suggested, document this.