Best Of

@Don Burrhus IMO, it just depends on your org's policies or procedures.

As a university, there are times when we create a record for the spouse. Spouse has been involved and engaged with the alum, gift officers wish to continue relationship, spouse requested to stay on communication lists.
There are other times when we just mark alum as deceased and do not promote spouse to a constituent. Alum has not been active, not a donor, been on list for no communication. Our feeling is that if alum was not engaged, chances are that spouse is not likely to become engaged. Option is always there if they do, to create a record. Otherwise, for us they are unnecessary records increasing our record count.

Hello! In the past, previous staff responsible for sending invoices for various things like sponsorships/events and scholarship/commencement awards did so by just completing an action that the invoice was sent and to what campaign/fund it was for. The follow-up process was not the cleanest. Now that we have NXT, our grants team is utilizing the prospect/opportunities arena for tracking their grant submissions, approvals, rejects, etc. Curious if any of you have used this arena for non-grant tracking for areas I listed above because then tracking from the work center could be utilized for more timely follow-up? Thanks! ~Denise

Like Devan, I am unsure if attachments are backed up currently with Blackbaud. After originally advising our staff not to use attachments, I have instead advised staff that they can use attachments, but must 1) also save an additional copy (hard copy or digital) and 2) add a query-searchable field to the RE record to accompany the attachment.

As far as whether digital files can replace hard copies, I'll quote something I heard from a lawyer at an educational conference. He was speaking about school records, but the same principle applies: if a court (or an auditor, or the IRS) asks you to provide required documentation, he won't care that your computer broke or your cloud storage was compromised - it is your responsibility to have the documentation on hand. To that end, I am a big believer in storing legally required documents in at least two different locations, whether that second be a hard copy or secure on-campus server storage.

Hello! We use event registration forms in NXT and they've been a great buy-in from the team (hooray!), but when new email addresses and phone numbers are added, we need to be able to source these. We use the 'comment' field in RE7 but those that are automatically added by NXT aren't 'known' to us to check; how are people dealing with this?

I've subsequently created a query to find 'phone changed this week' and 'phone comments blank' but then I'm having to detective if it's an event or gift via NXT, or a team member gone rogue. When consent changes are recorded via forms, there is an 'NXT user' attributed. Do we think this can be done for event and gift info? Or will comments finally come to NXT?