Lovve to hear about best practice(s) for relationship management i.e. tracking all contacts with a constituent (emails, phone calls, in person conversations, add scan of a thank you card, note birthday etc.) by various staff members and how that balances out with using plans and portfolios for prospect management. I don't really want to just put everything like that in notes, and Customer Service seems to be more for ticket buyers et al, than donors.
Here we keep all contact with donors within their plan because it's a centralized location and you can upload scanned items. Each contact is a step. We like using the plan because steps have a date associated with them and you can assign a step to someone.
That makes sense, thanks for your thoughts, good to hear how you do things! Much appreciated. I like the idea of assigning steps to people too.
Agreed with Madeline. We typically break out our plans per ask/solicitation. So all of the notes/interactions pertaining to that ask are kept within a plan. I also changed our setting so that you have to enter a worker for each step - to make sure nothing is forgotten or unassigned. That could be useful depending on how well people check their reminders screen. For more general information like bio and background - we still keep that in the Research/Notes tab for quick reference.