Hi, all! I've been searching around these forums and haven't really found an answer or solution to my question around donor bios, so I'm posing it here. At my organization, we haven't had a consistent practice surrounding entering donors' bios into their Tess records and - perhaps even more so - haven't had a consistent way of updating bios that exist and pulling them into constituent reports for donor profiles or event prep. We typically do our data entry at the household level, but are there benefits to doing bios at the individual level? How are you tracking donor bios at your organization? How are you updating them and how are you ensuring that bios are current? What reports do you like to pull for the most recently updated bio information? Thank you for any feedback you can offer in this space! We're trying to build out new processes for this, especially as we're coming into events season!
Hi Laura, are you talking about a paragraph-based bio of sorts? I know for us I created a Research Note called Bio Note where we track that sort of thing, trying to keep it to main details (where they work, board history, engagement with us, etc.) There's a report called Notes Report that you can use to pull that note for folks (either anyone who has a note of that type or with a list filter).
In terms of keeping them updated, that's really the hard part. It's usually a matter of pulling the bio for whatever purpose (let's say an annotated guest list for an event) and someone noticing something out of date, which I just make a note somewhere that it needs to be updated. Not perfect, but about as well as we can do!