Telephone Preference Service (TPS)

Kit Watson · February 2016

We have just done our first TPS screening, and I am now wondering about the best way to record this information on Raiser's Edge. As the TPS only applies to a specific telephone number, I don't want to flag up the whole record because they may have another telephone number that isn't registered. We also don't want to use the DNC column, because that would imply that we shouldn't call that number at all.

My initial thoughts are to use the Comments field for the specific phone number and enter "TPS Registered" against the number. One concern I had with doing this was that the number could be updated at some point in the future, but the "TPS Registered" left in the Comments field. I can make all of our RE users aware of the need to remove the comment when adding a new number, but this isn't a guaranteed way to stop it happening. I could work around this by using the Date Last Updated field in queries to show any that have been changed after the date of the TPS.

How does everyone else record TPS results on RE to ensure that they are as up to date and accurate as possible?

Melissa S Graves · February 2016

I think best practice should be never to remove/change that (or any) phone number - just change the type to former and add a new phone if is being replaced by something else.

I never remove/change existing phone numbers. If a person gets a new home number I mark the old one former home and put in a new row with the new one. This way someone keeping their own roloxex doesn't come to you 6 months from now and say Sally's phone number in RE is wrong - it is this number. You can say (or they should be able to easily see), no, that changed and is now former, this is the new one.

If you follow this for all of your phone numbers then the comment issue would never be a problem.

Melissa

James Redding · February 2016

Have you considered using the DNC (Do Not Contact) field that each phone number has? When then running queries you can then exclude anyone from marketing calls who has a DNC flag set. Otherwise i would be tempted to create a new telephone number type of XXXX -TPS i.e. Home - TPS, Mobile -TPS to denote you can't contact them with marketing. This would stop you losing the number which you can still use for operational purposes.

Alan French · February 2016

We considered a variety of methods, including:

using the DNC flag. We decided against this as we use that field to highlight incorrect/former numbers, and there would have been no way for us to distinguish whether a number was incorrect or correct but TPS.
copying each phone number onto the attribute tab with a description to say whether it was TPS or not. I strongly objected to this on the grounds that it meant duplication of effort for me as well as our data entry team and would have been a living nightmare to keep the two sets of numbers consistent.
creating new phone types with a prefix of TPS (e.g. "TPS Home Phone"). We ultimately went with this method, although it is not perfect either as I am finding that a small number of them are coming back into RE under a non-TPS type when we import data from our student record system, although this may not be an issue for other organisations (we use ImportOmatic, which matches phone numbers based on type rather than import ID)

I'd suggest putting "TPS" at the start rather than at the end of the type, as that way they'll all be grouped together alphabetically plus if the width of the Type column is too narrow to display the entire thing then the TPS indicator will still be visible.

Matt Page · March 2016

We had another thread on this here - https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/147/15328?post_id=48217 so I'm glad to see it resurface with more answers.

I agree with Alan and James in using the phone type of TPS - . It does require updating everytime, but at the time of the above thread I thought through a lot of different options, did it with attributes but was never happy. (Then we stopped using the phones for marketing and so it's not currently an issue) But when, a while later, someone replied to that thread with a similar suggestion to James & Alan's it instantly seemed like a good way around all of the problems I'd had with the other things I'd thought of.

Matt

Sarah Krenicki · July 2019

Hello! I'm resurrecting this thread because I'm facing a similar issue. Since we only use the DNC flag for numbers we are told not to call, I was opting to go the "flag TPS numbers as DNC" route. However I can't seem to find a way to flag them all through something like a global add, nor can I find that field in import. I don't want to have to manually go into 400 records to add this. If there's no good way to mark them I may just have to use the "Phone Type" method.

Alan French · July 2019

The only way I've been able to find to update the DNC field in bulk is by using ImportOmatic.

Telephone Preference Service (TPS)

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