Changes

Hi Andrew,

In our consortium, at some point or another, we have wished for an audit to be stored on every field in the constituent record.  The bulk of the ones we are concerned about, however, are already in place, name additions/deletions, address changes, etc. along with the old and new values.

What would really be a great addition is some kind of alert when a piece of information changes on a record I care about.  Did my board member move? Does my corporate contact have a new phone number? Did one of my VIPs get divorced? Is my opening night sponsor organizational record being merged? Is it my favorite subscriber's birthday?

~Dan

I second both Dan and Jeanne's points.
Having some sort of auto-tickler thing in place based upon constituencies(?) would be a welcome addition and like Jeanne mentions tracking why something is done is sometimes the most important thing to know.
For example we've been struggling lately with the fact that we don't really know why our patrons mail/phone/email restrictions have been updated and having a required note option available based upon the table being updated
(as opposed to constituency, or maybe with an "all" constituency option)
would be nice to have.
We've tried asking people to include a CSI but unless it is mandatory it can be hard to enforce.

Hi Dale and others,

Can you give me a few examples of Source and Reason? Would the source not be the same thing as the user (or in the case of changes made via the web, the constituent themself?)

Also, would you expect Reason to be free text or something you choose from a list?

Thanks!

Andrew

I could be wrong but maybe he is referring to source as being basically "Contact Method" like in the current CSI structure and even if not I'm thinking that is a good thing to keep track of anyways.
I like having the options available in CSI's to record this information including the free text option but like both Dale and I mentioned unless it's mandatory it doesn't really work.
So with that idea in mind and solely in regards to fields we've established may need some sort of additional required audit information be it dropdowns and/or text it would be nice if when updating those fields either a CSI (assuming they will exist in the next gen) gets generated to fill out or that required additional information gets sent to an audit trail of some sort for reference. 

Good questions Andrew!  My initial thoughts are that reason would be what prompted the address change, something like "returned mail" or "inbound patron call" or "telefunding call"

Source would be where the new address came from such as "change of address card from constituent", "Lexis Nexis", "411.com".

Of course in some cases the source and reason would be the same - for example "inbound patron call" - so maybe we don't need both?  Not sure.

I'm torn as to whether it would be better to have these as dropdowns or free text fields, I think there are pros and cons to both.  The benefit of having dropdowns is convenience and consistency.  Of course I doubt we would ever need to do any serious analysis on this so maybe free text is better to give people the flexibility to put in exact sources and reasons.

Just some thoughts.
Dale

And I'll add a 'true from life' story to the mix...

Jane Doe is a subscriber and a high end donor.  Jane calls the box office and tells them that she divorced and has gone back to her maiden name. The box office complies and changes the account. The devo relations manager, who has had a long term relationship with this client, later goes into her account, sees the change in name she doesn't recognize and changes it back to the old married name. (yes, she shouldn't have done that, but that didn't stop her).

Jane Doe calls the box office because her subscription just came in under her married name. The box office goes in and changes the name again.  And, I kid you not, the devo relations manager sees the new name later and changes it back.

The box office, thinking there might be a bug in the system, contacts me to see what the problem is, and I play referee between the two departments. This is when we started having CSIs for any changes made to our high end donor accounts that Christy mentioned. Unfortunately, I can't enforce this, so we do still run into problems now and then, but a lot less than we did before.

Heather
Seattle Rep 

Ray, good point about efficiency.
I think the idea so far is if something like this existed it would be up to the organization as to if it was marked as required and as Christy says not just limited to postal address.
Maybe in regards to efficiency and as Dave points out web usage there can be a default set that would not involve any additional input, like a default "source" as Dale describes and a text field that is optional (for internal use, not web).
Now this obviously would mean that again we run into the problem of what's to stop someone from never doing more than the default but I think when presented with the ability to easily make some additional notations the user would be far more likely to do so if it was right in front of them as opposed to needing to go and create something like a CSI.

PS. Heather, that is just too funny!

Hello,

It would be helpful to capture the reason some data is changed internally.  But, if the process to capture the "why" is mandatory and cumbersome I'm certain it will become meaningless (operators will just start clicking through). 

Would a free-form Reason field keep operators honest, in that they'd take the time to record the real "why" because there's no other choice, no dropdown?  Of course, they could type "Because" but mgrs could follow up on that kind of reason.  Not sure how a time-sensitive change (in line at the Box Office before a show) could be best managed...allow certain operators an opt-out of the mandatory process?

We've disabled the ability to make a name change to an account online, because we don't want subscribers to "will" their subscriptions to family or friends with a sneaky name change.  Any name change requests from the web come through as a CSI so that we can investigate.

Other than a name change, I think the patrons themselves should be able to make any changes directly online without any restrictions at all as long as they're informed of the consequences of changes.  We have QAS online and even when presented with a corrected address the patron CAN opt to keep the address as they entered it.  However, we display clear messaging that if they keep the bad address they might not get their tix in the mail or other correspondence. 

Thanks,
Mary

Getting back to constituent information that will need to be tracked... any change in the "Member of Link" which connects/disconnects individuals to their groups etc. will most definitely need to be tracked in the future.

In Heather's example - if the "Member of Link" was inactivated with a reason of "Divorce" would that have prevented the Dev Relations Manager from resetting the name (twice)? Don't know.

BUT, I would think that it would be mandatory to have those changes tracked - if organizational staff or self-serve web made an update to those links we would most certainly need to know that.

Currently, we make extensive use of the Constituent Audit Report so that key staff at each consortium organization can see who has made changes to their donors, subscribers and other VIP records.

We used to require that anyone making a change to a record send an email to the appropriate contacts at each organization, but, as you can imagine, this did not happen consistently.  We agreed that for our consortium, trying to enforce the use of CSI's was not practical for the same reasons.  However, having an added reason as to why a change was made would be enormously helpful.

There are a number of fields that aren't audited or that aren't in the standard version of the report, including Program Book Name, Alias, certain Attributes, and Associations.  We are considering trying to customize this report to pull in additional fields we'd like to track.

As far as future stories go, I agree with Erin that tracking changes to the Member of Link, including a reason for the change, would be very helpful.

Here are some current real life stories related to how we track (and would like to track) changes.

Jennifer works for the Art School.  She has a donor, Jane Doe, who is listed in the program book as Jane Doe Foundation.  One week when Jennifer goes to run the program book listings, she sees no entry for Jane Doe.  She looks in Jane's record and sees that the program book listing name is gone.  She doesn't know who made the change or why.  She sends some email around to her colleagues, but no one fesses up, so she adds it back in based on last week's spreadsheet.  She doesn't want to call the donor, because she doesn't want the donor to think we've messed up her record, but she's uneasy about adding the information back into the system in case the change was legitimate.

John works for the Dance School.  He reviews the constituent audit report every week to see what changes have been made to his big donors who are also involved with other consortium organizations.  One day, he sees on the constituent audit report that a donor's business address has been removed from the system.  He is unaware of any change in employment, so he contacts the department who made the change.  Turns out, the change was made by a work study student in error.  The student corrects the mistake, and the big donor gets the next mailing from the Drama School on schedule.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith buy tickets and give donations to several of our consortium organizations, but they are most attached to the Science Museum, where they are members.  Mrs. Smith calls the membership manager at the museum to let them know that Mr. Smith has passed away and asks that their account be updated.  The membership manager changes Mr. Smith's name status to Deceased and updates the shared salutations and the museum's salutations.  Jennifer, back at the Art School, sees the salutation update on the Constituent Audit Report and changes the Art School's salutations and their program book listing.  However, John at the Dance School doesn't have Mr. and Mrs. Smith on his watch list, because they are single ticket buyers.  Their ballet tickets are mailed with Mr. Smith's name on them.  Mrs. Smith is upset, because she already informed several University departments of Mr. Smith's death.