With all of the capability available in Blackbaud CRM™ to capture, record, and report on data, understanding what needs your attention can be like finding “Waldo” amid a sea of striped sweaters and blue jeans.
The great news is that Blackbaud CRM™ offers a few different ways to organize yourself and trigger your attention.
Email Inbox
RSS Feeds
Any user-defined datalist (and many out-of-box datalists) can be configured to offer an RSS Feed, as long as they contain a System Record ID and at least one Date in the output fields. An RSS Feed is triggered when a new record appears in the datalist, and an email with details is delivered to the subscriber’s email or feed reader. You can opt to include a hyperlink back to that record in CRM, as well. This is a great option for users to pick and choose which datalists to which they want to subscribe, and the notifications appear in their email inbox or in a browser feed reader.
Email Alerts
Administrators can configure Email Alerts for triggers such as task assignment, research request, or batch assignment. The Admins manage the subscriber list, making this a less self-service option, but a powerful tool when leveraging the workflows available within CRM. An alert is triggered when a new task or batch is added, or when the assignment changes to a new user, and an email is delivered to the user’s inbox.
Custom Email Alerts
Blackbaud CRM™ comes with several Email Alerts out-of-box, but other triggers may be helpful to engage users with the next step in a process. New Pledges of a high dollar amount, deceased constituents, or name/address changes for managed prospects may require attention in your organization. Alerts such as these can be created as Custom Email Alerts generated from a datalist in CRM. Here again, Administrators manage the subscriber list and design the email body, and users receive an email directly in their inboxes.
On Screen
My Fundraiser Page
Offering a suite of tabs which display Prospect Manager-specific data, the My Fundraiser Page can be configured even further to support the solicitation and stewardship processes. Out-of-box datalists include indicators when a Plan Step is overdue (yes, that yellow triangle!), and list the Next Step when one is completed. The Legend in a datalist can indicate when attention is needed by displaying the row formatted in bold or colorful font. Further, datalists can provide information about upcoming activity (examples: My Prospects’ Events - This Month and Next Month; or Prospect Birthdays - Next Month).
Data Hygiene and Audit Pages
You can explore configuring new pages or functional areas to support the ongoing work of data hygiene and audit. With the ability to configure any number of pages, tabs, and datalists to display data anomalies or cleanup tasks, the data maintenance activities can be organized into a single area of the tool. The best part about managing data hygiene in this way is that users can review the information and take immediate action to fix it or clean it up directly from the tab. This avoids the need for circulating spreadsheets and manually navigating record-to-record in order to keep your data healthy!
Helping your users sift through the system, and quickly understand what requires their attention or action, can streamline processes and support your business workflows. It’s likely that you will incorporate more than one alert type into your use of Blackbaud CRM™, offering your users a more automated way to interact with the system.