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David Zeidman
David Zeidman ✭
Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion

I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

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  • Sara Kramer
    Sara Kramer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

     One of the projects I'm working on is cleaning up the addressees and salutations.  Since it's on a different tab, my users forget to make sure the address and salutation are correct when updating a name, title, or marital status.

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Sara Kramer:

     One of the projects I'm working on is cleaning up the addressees and salutations.  Since it's on a different tab, my users forget to make sure the address and salutation are correct when updating a name, title, or marital status.

    For data entry I wish entering the zip would auto populate city/state without having to have any special functions like address accelerator.:)

  • Melissa Graves 2
    Melissa Graves 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

    Regions - I would love to have the ability to set regions (on address records) based on country/US state that automatically populated when an address is entered or changed. I hate that it is not on the Bio 1 tab and that is where most addresses are added to RE.

    Gender - automatically fix when a gender says unknown but the title is a known gender specific title (Mrs. Ms. Sister, Mr., etc) and prompt a user if it is a non-gender specific title (Dr. Sen, etc.) to choose a gender before closing the record IF they know what it is. I hate that Unknown is the default - blank should be the default and then I could make it a required field and a user would have to select Unknown if they did not know the gender.

    Marital Status - if a spouse is added or removed (or marked deceased?), prompt for change to marital status.

    Proposals - I can't tell you how much we are chasing after MGOs not keeping their proposals up-to-date. The gift processor adds a gift to a proposal but we leave it up to the MGO to update the status, add an action documenting their stewardship, etc. I wish that MGOs could not close records if there were "issues" with a proposal - such as it does not have a status that matches the funded amount, does not have a linked action but a gift was added more than a week ago, etc.

  • Karen Bartman
    Karen Bartman ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.
  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Karen Bartman:
    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.

    :)  Only if county were optional auto fill.  County line goes through several of our communities and at this point we don't bother to research which side of the line they are one as we don't do anything with county stats.

     

  • Gina Gerhard
    Gina Gerhard ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    Melissa Graves:

    Regions - I would love to have the ability to set regions (on address records) based on country/US state that automatically populated when an address is entered or changed. I hate that it is not on the Bio 1 tab and that is where most addresses are added to RE.

    Gender - automatically fix when a gender says unknown but the title is a known gender specific title (Mrs. Ms. Sister, Mr., etc) and prompt a user if it is a non-gender specific title (Dr. Sen, etc.) to choose a gender before closing the record IF they know what it is. I hate that Unknown is the default - blank should be the default and then I could make it a required field and a user would have to select Unknown if they did not know the gender.

    Marital Status - if a spouse is added or removed (or marked deceased?), prompt for change to marital status.

    Proposals - I can't tell you how much we are chasing after MGOs not keeping their proposals up-to-date. The gift processor adds a gift to a proposal but we leave it up to the MGO to update the status, add an action documenting their stewardship, etc. I wish that MGOs could not close records if there were "issues" with a proposal - such as it does not have a status that matches the funded amount, does not have a linked action but a gift was added more than a week ago, etc.

    I'd like to "second" Melissa's entry on Proposals. We have a similar issue and since the info on proposals is so critical to measuring performance and pipelines, this is a prime area to focus on.  The same could be applied to other areas of the system, where you want to require and/or trigger the entry of important data -- it would be great to have the ability to define where you needed to have this happen and define what it is you need to happen.

    Also - In some of the ideas coming up, like making Counties automatic, I'd like to make sure you can enable/disable the requirement as needed.  For instance, we cannot populate our counties in RE because it conflicts with an automatic address updating routine we have set up in FE -- so I'd love to see these automated routines but the ability to choose to implement or not.

  • Melissa Graves 2
    Melissa Graves 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2
    Karen Bartman:
    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.

    With regards to county and zip code: It is my assumption David is looking to find what data cleansing projects are out there that can be developed that currently have not yet been.

    Both of these have already been developed within AddressAccelerator so I am not sure he would go into developing something that currently exists - unless you can make a case for things within AddressAccelerator that you would like to work differently.

  • Christine Cooke
    Christine Cooke ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    Gina Gerhard:

    I'd like to "second" Melissa's entry on Proposals. We have a similar issue and since the info on proposals is so critical to measuring performance and pipelines, this is a prime area to focus on.  The same could be applied to other areas of the system, where you want to require and/or trigger the entry of important data -- it would be great to have the ability to define where you needed to have this happen and define what it is you need to happen.

    Also - In some of the ideas coming up, like making Counties automatic, I'd like to make sure you can enable/disable the requirement as needed.  For instance, we cannot populate our counties in RE because it conflicts with an automatic address updating routine we have set up in FE -- so I'd love to see these automated routines but the ability to choose to implement or not.

     Just a thought -- haven't tried it -- maybe someone has.  What about making a Business Rule for incomplete Proposals that have a gift received that pops up in the MGO's faces so that they have to look at it to remind them to update the proposal?

  • David Zeidman
    David Zeidman ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Christine Cooke:

     Just a thought -- haven't tried it -- maybe someone has.  What about making a Business Rule for incomplete Proposals that have a gift received that pops up in the MGO's faces so that they have to look at it to remind them to update the proposal?

    In response to Melissa, I am not look for any specific type of customization actually. It is really interesting to hear what needs everybody has. It is clear that you can make individual fields required in RE or require a specific attribute but you cannot combine criteria and it is only the presence or absence of a value that is ever checked and nothing any more complicated.

    I am looking at RE admin's requirements for their system. Any type really not just data cleansing.

    David

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

    yes, the zip code auto fill I've heard is part of address accelerator - but David's question  was if I could add whatever I wanted to in RE.  I'd like the zip code city auto fill. :)  The city table eliminates most errors but zip entry would be more efficient.

    I llike the suggestion of validating email format.

  • Melissa Graves 2
    Melissa Graves 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2
    JoAnn Strommen:

    yes, the zip code auto fill I've heard is part of address accelerator - but David's question  was if I could add whatever I wanted to in RE.  I'd like the zip code city auto fill. :)  The city table eliminates most errors but zip entry would be more efficient.

    I llike the suggestion of validating email format.

    I am not sure if you realize this but David does not work for BB - he has his own company developing add-ins to RE. He is a third party vendor. Most of the add ins he offers you have to pay for (he does have some freebies) but they would not become part of the RE basic program - it would be separate (at least unless BB decides to partner with him and sell it for him like they did with IOM).

    I do not mean to temper the conversation but wanted people to understand what these suggestions are likely to be used for and what they very likely will not be. If you want BB to make a change to the basic RE program you would go to product discovery for that.

  • David Zeidman
    David Zeidman ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Melissa Graves:

    I am not sure if you realize this but David does not work for BB - he has his own company developing add-ins to RE. He is a third party vendor. Most of the add ins he offers you have to pay for (he does have some freebies) but they would not become part of the RE basic program - it would be separate (at least unless BB decides to partner with him and sell it for him like they did with IOM).

    I do not mean to temper the conversation but wanted people to understand what these suggestions are likely to be used for and what they very likely will not be. If you want BB to make a change to the basic RE program you would go to product discovery for that.

    You are right I don't work for Blackbaud but my main reason for asking this question is to have this conversation. I think it is really interesting to hear how organizations tackle these issues. As far as I am concerned I am really interested in the blue sky thinking that members of this forum have and don't want to stifle the conversation with any kind of assumption.

    So let's hear more of your suggestions!

  • Melissa Graves 2
    Melissa Graves 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2
    David Zeidman:

    You are right I don't work for Blackbaud but my main reason for asking this question is to have this conversation. I think it is really interesting to hear how organizations tackle these issues. As far as I am concerned I am really interested in the blue sky thinking that members of this forum have and don't want to stifle the conversation with any kind of assumption.

    So let's hear more of your suggestions!

    Sorry I misunderstood. I guess when I think of you, David, I think of you as the customization guru. Hard to think of other reasons you would ask for these kinds of issues. Mea Culpa!

    I think a lot of my cleanup/audit issues are realted to conditionally required data. If a gift is from a board member (either hard or soft credit), it should go into X campaign. If it is from an assigned prospect (either hard or soft credit) it should go into Y campaign, etc. We try to do this during gift entry but then invariably have to audit with a quick query to be sure we did not miss any. I am going to see if we can get our programmer to set up something in VBA to catch these during batch but I am not 100% sure that is possible.

    Many of my appeals have packages, others do not. I would love for me to be able to tell RE when to require a package and when blank is fine.

    Actions - there is both a status field and a completed checkbox. Hellooo? My users invariably change the status but neglect to check the box or vice versa. If one is done - RE should prompt to ask if the other needs to be changed.

    Add/Sals - the concept of add/sals needs completely re-doing. I can't even tell you how much I think the current setup stinks.

    Solicitors - the way they get pulled into stuff I am forced to both change the type and add an end date when a solicitor is unassigned/leaves the org. Invariably one or the other is forgotten. Constantly checking these.

    Gift dates greater than today. In early January, every other year or so, a gift processor will still be entering December gifts but accidentally put the new year on the gift - essentially putting the gift date 11 months into the future. RE should really ask if you want a prompt whenever somone tries to add a gift date greater than today.

    My brain is tired - hope I got the conversation re-started.

  • Vanessa Taylor
    Vanessa Taylor ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

    I really want the phone grid to be unlinked from addresses. This information is no longer closely tied to physical location and it is both illogical and inconvenient to have them linked. I find that everyone wants to see this info on the Bio 1 tab, so they always just enter all phone types under preferred address. I don't blame them, as it is terribly inconvenient to have to go to the Addresses tab and actually open all the other address just to get at this information. Going along with this, I think there should be a checkbox where you can indicate if a phone/email is preferred or primary. Right now we have to enter a phone twice if we want to record that information and preserve what type it is (so once as Primary and once as Home, for example).
  • David Zeidman
    David Zeidman ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Vanessa Taylor:
    I really want the phone grid to be unlinked from addresses. This information is no longer closely tied to physical location and it is both illogical and inconvenient to have them linked. I find that everyone wants to see this info on the Bio 1 tab, so they always just enter all phone types under preferred address. I don't blame them, as it is terribly inconvenient to have to go to the Addresses tab and actually open all the other address just to get at this information. Going along with this, I think there should be a checkbox where you can indicate if a phone/email is preferred or primary. Right now we have to enter a phone twice if we want to record that information and preserve what type it is (so once as Primary and once as Home, for example).

    The reason that I was interested in finding out what everybody had to say was so that we could apply as much of it as possible in our new application Validatrix. The application allows you to set up custom business rules and would solve many of the issues that have been discussed in this thread. Data standards can really be maintained by enforcing rules that RE by itself cannot cope with.

    If you would like to find out more information then please take a look at our website: http://www.zeidman.info/downloads/validatrix.php

    Thanks again for all your input

  • Hannah Wiginton
    Hannah Wiginton ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
    JoAnn Strommen:

    For data entry I wish entering the zip would auto populate city/state without having to have any special functions like address accelerator.:)

    [quote user="JoAnn Strommen"]

    For data entry I wish entering the zip would auto populate city/state without having to have any special functions like address accelerator.:)

    [/quote] 

     

    For sure!! Paradigm did this...why is RE not doing this?

     

  • Barb Andrews
    Barb Andrews ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Reply

    JoAnn Strommen:

    Karen Bartman:

    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.
     

    :)  Only if county were optional auto fill.  County line goes through several of our communities and at this point we don't bother to research which side of the line they are one as we don't do anything with county stats.

     

     

    I agree, it would be very helpful if the County would populate with each zip code entry.  Counties could then be used for mapping out all kinds of information from potential visit lists to prospect assignments.
  • Jennifer Donlevie
    Jennifer Donlevie ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    Karen Bartman:

    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.


    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.

     

    I completely agree with this county information.  We use it extensively for grants.  Not only do you need to look up the county, it's on a completely different and inconvenient screen.

  • Jennifer Donlevie
    Jennifer Donlevie ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic
    I would like to easily be able to fix all my contacts associated with organizations.  There seem to be 5 differnet things you need to include or check orr to make sure they are in a mail merge export.  I spend so much time fixing contacts - it would make my life much easier if I could fix them all in bulk somehow.
  • Daniel Noga 2
    Daniel Noga 2 ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Photogenic


    I don't usually have anything for these kinds of discussions, but I am in the middle of working with the Duplicate Constituent Management Tool and something keeps happening that I wish there were a better way to deal with.



    As it searches for duplicates, the tool (faithfully doing its job, of course) often returns sets of records that belong to married couples/cohabitants that are not yet linked. When this happens, although I am in the middle of a different task, it's best to just go in and fix those right away, lest one forgets. Well, to do that, I have to get out of the Duplicate tool, go find the records and do this manually.



    Now, I know it only takes a minute or two to do this manually; and I know that the purpose of the tool is to find duplicates, and incorporating functionality to link Spouses would be tangential to that. Still, BB's gotta know this is going to happen a bazillion times while you're fixing duplicates, since two people with the same address, last name, phone number and email address are probably going to look like duplicates to a machine--and we already have this nice, quick way to merge records--so if I had a magic wand, I'd conjure up a function within the Duplicate Constituent Management tool to link Constituent records as Spouses, even creating the Relationship record if need be. That's part of the same task in my book.
  • Jane Kenny
    Jane Kenny ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    Karen Bartman:

     
    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.


    In would be nice if the county would be populated automatically. As it is now, unless you manually go in to look up all the counties, they are a mess.

     

    I agree with the counties being a mess!  Does the address updates not update counties?  It appears anytime you import addresses they do not update.  Just determined we need to run the address accelerator after every import to insure accurate counties.

     

  • Jane Kenny
    Jane Kenny ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    David Zeidman:

     

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

     

    Rules around adding an individual constitent that only has a business address.  RE automatically populates a home address that has to be deleted.  Then the business address has be manually checked as primary address.  when adding a new constituent you should be able to mark the business address as primary from the relationship (org) tab not the address tab.

  • Karen Hartt
    Karen Hartt ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic

    JoAnn Strommen:

    Sara Kramer:

     One of the projects I'm working on is cleaning up the addressees and salutations.  Since it's on a different tab, my users forget to make sure the address and salutation are correct when updating a name, title, or marital status.

     

    For data entry I wish entering the zip would auto populate city/state without having to have any special functions like address accelerator.:)

    Auto Add for city using zip wouldn't work in our area, we are very rural and have several towns attached to one zipcode - for example, the zip for Ellsworth, Maine is also used for Trenton, Lamoine, and Mariaville. This would create more headaches than it would solve.

     

  • Robin Evans 3
    Robin Evans 3 ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    David Zeidman:

    I'm doing some work around data standards and I'd be interested to hear about your data entry rules. Assuming you could add whatever you wanted to in RE, which rules would you enforce to data entry/changes by your colleagues.

    Some examples that I came up with were: Validating email address format, ensuring they added a specific constituent code for certain gift levels or maybe you have something really complex on your wish list.

    I'd really love to hear what your biggest data entry issues are in terms of maintaining good data quality.

     

    If I had a magic wand I'd really like the ability to select a default set that would auto-populate when a new record is being created.  Also I'd like it to be a system option, not a user option.  It is time consuming to go to each user's computer to select the Default set and then ask them to remember to press Shift-F2 everytime they create a new constituent record.

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