Where is the best place to record notes on donors?

Hi Erin,

We utilise CSI’s for a number of different jobs similar to what Heather and Dale have listed.

Something we have done this year with CSI’s is enter all our “feedback” including backdated info. We used a category of “customer Feedback” with a number of “activities” to group it for reporting. If there is a letter or email associated with the “feedback” we enter this under notes, resources as an uploaded document or note. It has enabled a department that didn’t utilise Tessitura as much as we would like to use it as a tool to reporting to senior management and our board easily. When the “feedback” is followed up this can be tracked in the CSI or, you can assign a person to follow up the query.

We also use CSI’s when Donations come in, all monies are processed in our Box office, we put the money into credits if the donations is $101 or above, enter a CSI, Category- “development” Activity- “contribution” or “sponsorship” with the details of the donation, ie which “membership” or “campaign” and name the donation is to be made out to in the notes section of the CSI. Our development department then processes the monies and acknowledgments for these donations.

We used to use notes for a lot of this initially but found they were harder to keep track of

Brenda

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Heather Kraft
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 4:52 AM
To: Brenda Fehlberg
Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Where is the best place to record notes on donors?

Erin - I'll echo Dale's sentiment about using CSIs for more of the day to day contacts and saving notes and the research tab for some of the 'bigger' issues. It is also super important that everyone is on board and knows what goes where, because otherwise you can end up with an amalgam of information that no one can actually find or access.

The reason we try not to use notes is that is hard to find specific bits in the notes field and even harder to report out about it. It also can get pretty messy if you do all your recording in that one area. That being said, some orgs use Nntes only and are fine with it. We've just found after being on Tessi for 5 years the notes get awfully cluttered and we like the structure of a CSI for being able to filter and pull different types of contacts.

- Heather
Seattle Rep 

Erin,

You'll probably want to get with your people and develop some note entering protocols and make sure you are all entering the same kind of notes in the same place.

We do use Research - Notes for more researchy type info - short bio, long bio, dietary preferences, obituaries etc.

For day to day contacts with constituents - such as "Ms. Smith called to exchange her Butterfly tickets for Carmen tickets" we use Contacts - Customer Service.  We also use this area for notes like "Changed address from x to y.  Membership appeal letter returned as bad address - new address per Lexis Nexis".

For notes related to a solicitation we use Contacts - Solicitations - Solicitation Tasks

Dale

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Hi Erin,

We utilise CSI’s for a number of different jobs similar to what Heather and Dale have listed.

Something we have done this year with CSI’s is enter all our “feedback” including backdated info. We used a category of “customer Feedback” with a number of “activities” to group it for reporting. If there is a letter or email associated with the “feedback” we enter this under notes, resources as an uploaded document or note. It has enabled a department that didn’t utilise Tessitura as much as we would like to use it as a tool to reporting to senior management and our board easily. When the “feedback” is followed up this can be tracked in the CSI or, you can assign a person to follow up the query.

We also use CSI’s when Donations come in, all monies are processed in our Box office, we put the money into credits if the donations is $101 or above, enter a CSI, Category- “development” Activity- “contribution” or “sponsorship” with the details of the donation, ie which “membership” or “campaign” and name the donation is to be made out to in the notes section of the CSI. Our development department then processes the monies and acknowledgments for these donations.

We used to use notes for a lot of this initially but found they were harder to keep track of

Brenda

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Heather Kraft
Sent: Wednesday, 4 May 2011 4:52 AM
To: Brenda Fehlberg
Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Where is the best place to record notes on donors?

Erin - I'll echo Dale's sentiment about using CSIs for more of the day to day contacts and saving notes and the research tab for some of the 'bigger' issues. It is also super important that everyone is on board and knows what goes where, because otherwise you can end up with an amalgam of information that no one can actually find or access.

The reason we try not to use notes is that is hard to find specific bits in the notes field and even harder to report out about it. It also can get pretty messy if you do all your recording in that one area. That being said, some orgs use Nntes only and are fine with it. We've just found after being on Tessi for 5 years the notes get awfully cluttered and we like the structure of a CSI for being able to filter and pull different types of contacts.

- Heather
Seattle Rep 

Erin,

You'll probably want to get with your people and develop some note entering protocols and make sure you are all entering the same kind of notes in the same place.

We do use Research - Notes for more researchy type info - short bio, long bio, dietary preferences, obituaries etc.

For day to day contacts with constituents - such as "Ms. Smith called to exchange her Butterfly tickets for Carmen tickets" we use Contacts - Customer Service.  We also use this area for notes like "Changed address from x to y.  Membership appeal letter returned as bad address - new address per Lexis Nexis".

For notes related to a solicitation we use Contacts - Solicitations - Solicitation Tasks

Dale

This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Development Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Development forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!