Action Type Best Practice

Sarah Krenicki · February 2019

We are about to send out a save the date postcard for our annual 5K, and I'm going to record it as an action.

I've selected "mailing" for category, but the real question is should I:

1) Put "postcard" under Action Type, and then in the "Letter" section add "5K save the date"

2) Put "5K save the date" under Action Type and Repeat "5K save the date" in "Letter"

3) something else entirely?

There is no standard for how we've done actions in the past and it's been done both ways plus some (typing the purpose of the mailing in the document field, etc). I'd love to standardize in the most efficient way possible. Thanks!

Mark Guncheon 2 · February 2019

Two ways of looking at this:

1. What's the best way to record an action so that everyone understands what the action is

2. How do you report on actions?

We focus on 1. from above but keep 2. in the back of our minds. What we would do in this situation is code "mailing" for the category but then place an action type from one of the following : discovery, cultivation, research, solicitation, stewardship. We've determined these are the main reasons for actions for our prospects.. We have a few others for non-prospect purposes like pledge reminder, New Donor Packet and a couple more.

Then we use notes to explain what was done to accomplish this action type.

Sarah Krenicki · February 2019

I haven't even thought of using Action Type as a purpose designator! We literally have 88 different action types in the system right now ranging from super specific (ex: "note and invite to march 2015 event") to super vague ("email"). Some of these are purpose designators (cultivation, stewardship, research) but they seem to be the least used... sigh.

Mark Guncheon 2 · February 2019

**? Wow! We had a similar problem. Our reporting staff met and then we met with our gift officers and narrowed it down to the ones I mentioned earlier and made most of the others "inactive" in the config/tables section. I would recommend taking the time to do that. It will make it easier for your gift officers to use those action types. It's been extremely important for us that gift officers create actions in NXT. It's one way we measure their success as a gift officer.

Mergen Peries · March 2019

We need to do this too. I have been thinking to keep action type fairly generic, to the general purpose of the action, like

Invitation

Newsletter

Thank you

But then you need to track by programe

Major Givers - Thank You

Major Givers - General

Prospect - Proposal

Prospect - Visit

Volunteer - xxx

etc

Then you need do deal with the categories that NXT/RE doesn't have, like SMS

SMS - Birthday

SMS - Appeal

RE has campaign field too, so you could track those programes via that, but then we need to clean that up too....and that's not exposed in NXT....

Argh! ?

Faith Murray · March 2019

We do a hybrid. We found that simply "cultivation, stewardship" was too vague to be really useful. But we didn't want to get event-specific. So we refine it according to program purpose and include things like:

Planned Giving Program-Cultivation, visit, stewardship, etc.

Data Maintenance: future address update, solicit code change, etc.

General Stewardship-research, phonecall, send card, visit, etc.

Survey Response

Welcome Program-steps 1-12

Monthly Donor Program-solicitation, reactivation, termination, stewardship, etc.

The reason we need a bit more clarity is so that we can fully utilize Action Tracks --- looking forward, rather than recording an event after the fact. A 12-step Action Track with just "solicitation, stewardship" etc. would not be useful at all for pulling program-targeted mailing lists.

Action Type Best Practice

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