Where is the best place to record notes on donors?

I echo Heather and Dale’s responses. We certainly use notes, and occasionally I wish we didn’t so much, because they get rather cluttered and very difficult to pull on. However, what I love about notes is that we have various notes that trigger icons in our header to alert key staff that there is important information for them to look into.

For example we have a special note for gift entry staff, for the box office (to administer VIP level service) and for MGOs to remind themselves about specific preferences of the donor.

We use solicitations to track more specific details based on meetings, etc and to note if there is a call report attached in research documents.

CSIs we use sparingly for donor information, its more for global things to communicate to various departments and we use it for the web when we do online RSVPs for events.

Good luck!

Marta

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