Organizations Contact Types

Donna Briatico:

I'm looking for some guidance in how to handle contact types for organizations. Currently we are using "main contact" as the contact to mail an acknowledgement letter or receipt to.  However, management feels that this not always the right person to mail an annual report or invite to.  Any suggestions are welcome.

I highly doubt its the best way, but the way we have it set up is with several contact types:


Primary Contact- this is the default or the gets the receipt contact

Event Contact- if there is someone specifically that should be invite to events

Sponsorship Contact- the person to contact in regards to solicitations/event sponsorships


then when we run receipts we output the primary contact; when we run event lists i output both the 'event contact' and the 'primary contact' and only use the primary when there is no event contact, so it gets a little manual but thats how its been done for years and started long before I got here. I've never really figured out a better way to do it or had the time to do all the cleanup. Also if someone would be two types of contact, such as the best person for receipts and solicitations we use primary as the default. That way when in doubt it goes to the primary.


Best of luck!


 


 

I agree with what has been said - the number one thing is figure out your needs and then you can set up contacts to support that


One of our needs was to have a contact to send Event Sponsor materials to, so we set up a contact type for that and I use an export that pulls that type for mailings


Good luck!

Joanne

It's great to see this topic in the community. Contact types can be confusing and difficult to clean up. Looking forward to see others' ideas on how to manage these. Currently, we use primary, administrative, and event contact types which work well for regular mailings and receipting purposes. Moving forward I'd love to be able to designate contacts that should receive invoices versus acknowledgements and set up mail templates to automatically pull the correct contact based on type and letter code.

Lawrence Rush:

It's great to see this topic in the community. Contact types can be confusing and difficult to clean up. Looking forward to see others' ideas on how to manage these. Currently, we use primary, administrative, and event contact types which work well for regular mailings and receipting purposes. Moving forward I'd love to be able to designate contacts that should receive invoices versus acknowledgements and set up mail templates to automatically pull the correct contact based on type and letter code.

Donna - So here's how it looks in one of the letters we do in RE Mail.

(Note: I had one error in my previous email -- the person you want to receive the acknowledgement DOES need to be marked as a Contact in order for this to work)

• So on the Org Address tab (sometimes it's 6, sometimes its 7 depending on which Mail type you're using), in Step 1 you choose Mail to contacts
• In Step 2, hit the Contact Information button.
  • Do NOT hit the Contact Address Attribute button - this is not what you want.
• At the bottom of the next window, there's a button for Contact Attributes.
• Open that up and Include the contact attribute.
  • You can choose 'Print one for each contact found' but we try to only ever have one contact marked to receive acknowledgements.
• In 2 Fields to Include, remember in your Addressee and Salutation fields to define the CONTACT addr/sals - it's a category you can select.

So for organization records, RE will choose the contact that has the Acknowledgement Contact attribute, and use the Contact addressee/salutation that you have chosen (in your 2. Fields to Include).

Donna Briatico:

Gina Gerhard:

This has been posted previously, but we treated the contact for acknowledgements as a 'secondary' tier of contacts.

1. For our main system of contacts (used for general purposes, mailings, etc.) - we use the Contact checkbox and Contact types (primary, secondary, etc.) on the General 1 tab of the relationship.
2. For our 'secondary' system of contacts (for acknowledgements) - we created a Relationship Attribute called 'Acknowledgment Contact' and put that attribute on the most recent contact we want to use for acknowledgement purposes.  That person does NOT necessarily need to be marked as a contact per 1) above.
   • Since this attribute is not easy to see, we also repurposed a field on the General 1 tab (the field under Position), named it Rel Categ and populate it with 'Ack Contact' there.  That way you can more easily see who is marked as the Acknowledgement contact.
   • For the acknowledgment letters, the process just goes and finds the contact who has the relationship attribute.

So 1) and 2) act independently of each other.


This has worked well and all our staff are happy with this solution - before the main system of contacts kept getting 'fudged' to work as the acknowledgement contact -- so now we can meet both needs and they don't conflict.

Gina,

In reference to the relationship contact type; how does this work in RE Mail? Could you give me more details?

Thanks.

 

Gina's solution (which is pretty much what I set up at my last 2 orgs) also works in Export.


I love the addition of repurposing a first-class field so you see that info without opening up the Relationship Records, though!  Don't know why I never thought to do that...would have saved me oodles of time moving thru Relationship Records looking to see which ones were marked as Ack Contacts (I set it up as Ack Contact: Yes/No and put dates in and comments as to who/what provided the information...signed paperwork, DoD said so, etc....which helped when someone asked why the letter was printed for Jane Doe instead of Robert Hernandez.)

Meghan Hickey:

Jen Claudy:

Gina's solution (which is pretty much what I set up at my last 2 orgs) also works in Export.


I love the addition of repurposing a first-class field so you see that info without opening up the Relationship Records, though!  Don't know why I never thought to do that...would have saved me oodles of time moving thru Relationship Records looking to see which ones were marked as Ack Contacts (I set it up as Ack Contact: Yes/No and put dates in and comments as to who/what provided the information...signed paperwork, DoD said so, etc....which helped when someone asked why the letter was printed for Jane Doe instead of Robert Hernandez.)

Hi Jen,

How would you set up an Export to pull a contact based on their relationship attributes? Would this work in a Gift Export? Thanks for your advice!

Meghan