Lightweight Constituent Data Entry Tool?

Our executives are out in the community meeting people with whom we want to engage/connect.  These community members may never be a donor, member or ticket buyer.  We'd like to give them a tool to enter contact information for the people they are meeting, that will ultimately be constituent records in Tess.

We don't think we want them to enter data directly into Tess because they aren't regular Tess users so they aren't accustomed to working with an industrial strength user interface.  They are executives, some of whom may lack comfort or patience with data entry.  They'll be adding the contact info on their mobile devices so they need a lightweight user interface vs. the Tess application.  

Further, we don't want to create dupes.  We want to be deliberate about how we upload to Tess, e.g. with assigning attributes, constituencies or control groups. 

I'm exploring options.  What are you using for contact data entry by executives?

Do you batch upload the contacts to Tess?  If yes, do you use the Constituent Import Utility?

I appreciate there is Tessitura on the Go, but it is for viewing, not adding.  Even if it did allow add/edit, I wouldn't give the executives those rights. So it is only part of the solution. 

I have worked with TRBO, but constituent creation on that tool is part of membership or ticket sales. 

I've looked at business card scanning apps.  However, each executive would have their own database and I wonder about how we'd access it.   Further, half of the community members have business cards. 

Thanks for your ideas!

  • Honestly, my Directors save the information as contacts and forward to me in Outlook.  They add a quick note about the person and I then enter the data in Tess.  Because there was a significant duplicate problem when I arrived, I enter these manually, doing multiple searches before we add anyone new.  Luckily we are small enough that I don't get a ton of these each week so it's a good end of day Friday task.  

    All that to say my suggestion would be to have them add the prospect to their contacts on their phone and forward to you once back in the office.

    I've also heard of people having good success with EverNote.