Using same Phone/Email type for multiple records on one constituent....

Tom Klimchak · June 2021

We've been using Raiser's Edge for about 10 years now and I think there was a time when we were strongly discouraged from using the same phone/email TYPE on a single record. So we created Phone Types of Email 1, Email 2, Email 3, Student Email, etc. (pretty creative, huh?)

Anyyyway.... In the last few years it seems as though that may have changed (maybe with the whole email/phone record upgrade?)... It looks as though we can now have multiple email records on a constituent, all of the same Email 1 type (or whatever) and RE is fine with it as long as only one of them is marked as primary. And, yes, I know you can even turn off the warnings in Config --> Business Rules.

My question: how many of you do this: just have three or four email records all with the same type of "Email".... or "Cell Phone"... with the inclusion of the Primary check mark I'm not sure if we need use the numbered type names anymore...

JoAnn Strommen · June 2021

We have unique names for each phone/email listing on a record and the business rule that there can only be one of each type.

Many of our records do not have any numbers marked as primary, even if it's the only one on the record. I can see us ending up with multiple #s listed as cell and the primary checkbox being arbitrarily checked/unchecked depending on who is updating.

I've had to explain to others that is it's a cell #, use 'cell', not 'home'. If we implement any type of texting program, we want to know which #s are cell.

Heather MacKenzie · June 2021

I think it would be important to be able to distinguish a cell from a landline, or the preferred cell from the not preferred cell (I've only had partial success doing this with the Primary box checkbox.), so my first reaction is to not do that with phones.

The email feature in Webview and Online Express both asks you to choose an email type. I have no idea how it would work if you had multiple emails under the same type, but I wonder if you've maybe just solved the issue of not being able to email to both spouses at once because they have different email types? If they were the same email type, would it email to them all?

If I didn't have too much else on my plate today, I'd go test that!

Alan French · June 2021

We used to use numbers on the end of our phone/email types when we first moved to RE - due to the migration process we ended up with about 90 types! ? We've moved away from that and now just indicate what category it is (e.g. home phone, mobile phone, personal email, business email etc.)

I find the primary tick box works well when it's used, but we do have a lot of records where none of their phones/emails are marked as primary - one area that I need to clean up in future!

Miki Martin · June 2021

Currently we have several types under both Email and Phone. I totally understand needing to differentiate between business or personal phones and cell numbers. JoAnn Strommen‍ makes a great point about needing to know which are cell numbers for instances of wanting to text.

When it comes to email, if you can differentiate business from a personal address, then go for it. We have several constituents who use their business email as their main contact so if that's all we have that is primary and that is Email. We are trying to clean up our types so I would prefer just having business, email and previous. So many of our records right now actually have the same email address listed two or three times with different types ? so anything I can do to reduce this duplicity makes me happy! I don't see an issue having multiple addresses listed as Email since only one is primary.

Christine Cooke 2 · June 2021

This discussion makes me wonder once again -- how the heck in this day and age - do any of you determine if a phone number is a cell or landline? There was a time when you would see on forms a blank space for each. That seems to have disappeared on most forms that ask for contact info from a constituent. Personally I don't want to label them all just "phone" in case you can determine the difference and have both. Partially because of the texting thing.

I'm not on NXT but still use 1 and 2 with the types. I suppose it's a cleanup project but there are so many old numbers that were put in that are marked inactive that are duplicates I think, that's it's going to be something that takes awhile. (still working on the same kind of duplication in addresses - this is why I find imports annoying). Am also not using the primary checkbox as that came with that update that finally made phone/emails a separate island from address.

And that primary checkbox is not obvious when you open a record in RE7 and I tend to want things of that importance in one's face because not everyone scrolls and such as much as they should to find those details.

Tom Klimchak · June 2021

There are services that you can run your phone number list through and they will identify cell phone carrier and/or landline. I think Blackbaud has a service for it (I can't imagine they don't) but we also found that most Texting Software Platforms can also do it for you... We happen to use SignalVine and they took our entire phone number list and gave us back results... took a while, but I was able to update the phone types in RE with an import.

We're finding that Home Phone, Business Phone, Phone 1, Phone 2, etc doesn't really make much sense anymore, but Cell Phone and Landline are two big differences (you can text to Cell Phones!)... And we're finding that Cell Phone 1, Cell Phone 2, Cell Phone 3 actually makes it difficult to work with some external vendors...

We're leaning towards this scenario: Cell Phone, Landline, Cell Phone, Cell Phone ... and marking one of them as Primary. We don't have that many phone numbers or email addresses without that Primary flag (we regularly clean that up)...

This is the plan. Do we have the resources to do this? (hahahahahahah... pt 1 of 97)

Alan French · June 2021

Sounds like you need to have stern words with whoever came up with the phone numbering system in the States! ? In the UK, if a number begins with "07" it's a mobile/cell and anything else is a landline. Or possibly a fax machine...

Miki, does having the "previous" type not contribute to your problem of having the same email address with different types? If you change a business email to previous and then it somehow gets added back into the system, RE won't recognise it as being the same and will let you create a duplicate. If you leave it as business but mark it as inactive, for example, you'll get an error if you try and re-add it to that record.

Jenny Norton · June 2021

Hi. For emails, we have Preferred email, Home email, Home email 2, Business, EmailFinder and some weird old ones. We have the duplicate thing turned on so if we get a new EmailFinder run for example it won't load the same one if we already have it. If someone has a home email and a business email on Bio1, we determine which should be the Preferred email (we default to home first, business second unless Cons tells us) and add that in. So someone's record would look like this:

[X] Preferred email: 123abc@somemail.com

Home email: 123abc@somemail.com

Business email: abc123@someorg.org

If we find out the home/preferred bounces, then we'd mark home email inactive and copy the business email into the Preferred email.

I know - it's probably a weird way to do it but it works for us.

Phones we try to determine if it's home or cell but a lot of people just enter their cell in the home spot and so sometimes we have both home and cell with the same number. We don't use the primary checkbox for phones unless the Cons tells us specifically.

Jenny

Jeannie Goings · June 2021

Adding on to what Tom Klimchak‍'s post, we run our numbers through ThruText which is part of GuidedFundraising. ThruText identifies land, cell, and I believe, carrier. Apparently there are message size limitations for those on Verizon. Phone Validator is a free service online and works well for the one offs. It will let you know the general location and type of phone.

Tatyana Leifman · June 2021

Sounds like you need to have stern words with whoever came up with the phone numbering system in the States! ? In the UK, if a number begins with "07" it's a mobile/cell and anything else is a landline. Or possibly a fax machine...

Oh, we had that here too. In New York City, for ex., "917" was originally exclusively for fax machines and cell phones. And "646" was an overlap for landlines in Manhattan, but then they started running out of numbers, add to that portability of numbers where you can take your number with you from provider to provider, and now you no longer can tell whether 646 (the newish area code in Manhattan) is a cell phone or landline (212 is still overwhelmingly landlines probably simply due to it being the oldest area code and the one they ran out of numbers for the first) ?

Miki Martin · June 2021

Alan French‍ we don't have any way currently of bringing in new addresses from the outside. If we have online donations through OLX I review each record and just ignore any changes so it doesn't update the information, provided the address is something we already have. As for duplicates, HA! I have found the same email address (and sometimes phone number) listed up to three times in one constituent's record, all with different types! I delete any duplicates and make the one record we keep Email (or Personal Mobile/Voice). Now that you mention it, I am not sure we are marking Previous addresses as inactive so that's something I need to go in and globally update.

Tom Klimchak‍ I like the idea of using Landline instead of voice. It's a much more consistent description and you know for a fact it's not a cell number. We have so many phone number types (22 - I just counted ?) it's overwhelming. I don't know who added all those. And we have a measly 13 email types. One of the many things I have on my plate to clean up in my spare time. We don't use any outside services for anything but in the chance we ever do, knowing the descriptions need to be succinct is good information to have.

Using same Phone/Email type for multiple records on one constituent....

Comments

Categories