V12 contact management

This sounds very interesting, and I'd love to hear the same!

We haven't really spent much time thinking about contact points, but I can see a time about a year from now where we will start getting these requests from users.  Having looked at the tables for this in V12, I don't think it will be much more complicated than adding attributes en masse.

I can see this taking two forms. One would be a user accessible utility for one time updates to a large number of patrons.  The other would be a scheduled database job which would update the contact points based on business rules.

One concern I have is that some departments will go a little crazy with contact points. From my perspective, you should only add the contact point if there is a compelling reason to do so. For 98% of your patrons, there will never be a need.  The biggest group it would affect are VIPs, Board Members and Major Donors.  These records tend to get touched regularly by the Development Department anyway.  My worry would be that any automatic manipulation of contact points would step on what the Devo folks are trying to do.

If someone asks to add a contact point to a large number of patrons, I'd want to have a very long and detailed discussion about what they are trying to accomplish with the request.

- Levi

We haven't really spent much time thinking about contact points, but I can see a time about a year from now where we will start getting these requests from users.  Having looked at the tables for this in V12, I don't think it will be much more complicated than adding attributes en masse.

I can see this taking two forms. One would be a user accessible utility for one time updates to a large number of patrons.  The other would be a scheduled database job which would update the contact points based on business rules.

One concern I have is that some departments will go a little crazy with contact points. From my perspective, you should only add the contact point if there is a compelling reason to do so. For 98% of your patrons, there will never be a need.  The biggest group it would affect are VIPs, Board Members and Major Donors.  These records tend to get touched regularly by the Development Department anyway.  My worry would be that any automatic manipulation of contact points would step on what the Devo folks are trying to do.

If someone asks to add a contact point to a large number of patrons, I'd want to have a very long and detailed discussion about what they are trying to accomplish with the request.

- Levi

Nothing has been definitively decided here at UMS, but we've discussed using Contact Point Purposes for email lists instead of Interests. I would use something like Claire described to automate moving from Interests to Contact Point Purposes.

It seems to make more sense to attach the actual email address (Contact Point) directly to an email list (Contact Point Purpose) than to 'hope' that the email list (as an Interest) makes it to the correct email address. Much clearer for our staff when a patron calls and asks to "take my prodigy.net email address off the email list" or "what lists is my aol.com address signed up for?".

Our contact restrictions are also very specific, and they currently live in Attributes. Moving them to Contact Point Purposes would be a chance to apply them directly - i.e.: do not mail to THIS address - rather than blocking the constituent entirely.

Then again, putting opt-ins together with opt-outs might lead to some confusion. Based on all this, I can see where you are concerned about departments going a little crazy with them, Levi. :)

Anyway, those are the current thoughts - I'm always interested in others' views, too...

Beth