Annotations from Database View - advice on converting to Summary Notes in NXT

Aldera Chisholm

Hi all,

I've hit a bit of a struggle, as my org used Annotations in Database View pretty heavily, set up with Business Rules. Of course, these don't translate over to NXT. Knowledgebase advising recreating any needed info into Summary Notes.


However.. any good suggestions on how to do this as a group? I'm sure there is something I can do along the lines of exporting all the annotations by constituent in database view  and importing them as a Note with the type of RE NXT Summary so that they will show on a NXT constituent's Summary, but has anyone else done this and can save me some brain power by giving advice on how to do this?  


Thanks!

Aldera

Keri Barnhart

Annotations are so useful, but also so not useful, aren't they?


I was looking at this project but in my analysis of the annotations present on records, they were such a diverse group and a huge number were stale or misleading so that I didn't want to just import them as the summary note. Some of the business rules we used were already handled in the top section (through constituencies, memberships, or deceased/inactive icons), and we could use solicit codes for others ("requests no email", "government official", etc - things that impact solicitation) or train staff to look at a new place for information that had been in the pop-up. Annotations show up in the black box on the NXT record but definitely being able to have the information right under the constituent name is more visible.


What I started to do is export all annotations with the constituent ID, name, preferred contact info (just a snippet to check the annotation) and spouse name/marital status. Then I did some Excel formulas to look for key phrases and sorting to begin identifying stale annotations that could be deleted and ones that should be moved to a better location. The plan was to take care of those, then look at the rest for standardizing to use in the NXT Summary. I never quite got that far because I started with the Organization Match Notes (used similarly to NXT Summary Notes but not visible on the org's record in NXT) and it was a huge headache. Since annotations are still technically visible, it seemed wiser to just let them be until we could get an intern.


One thing that bothered me about the NXT Summary Note is that it didn't preserve line breaks. I'm not sure if that was ever fixed - I mentioned it to Jarod Bonino back in 2017 but it wasn't changed as of last winter, as far as I could tell. That limits some of the utility of the note, since you can't use line breaks to delineate different types of information for quick reference. You'd have to put in special characters like • or | for the visual break, which doesn't lend itself to details.


If your annotations are consistent in the information they display and not too lengthy, I think you'd be able to do the Excel list with formulas to identify and split out the common parts, and another to recombine them in a format suitable for the NXT Summary Note, whether you choose to go with sentences or bullet points.


Best of luck!

Aldera Chisholm

Keri! You are an angel. This is exactly what I needed to hear. Great point re: the excel formulas. I'm sure there are quite a few we could purge out of the system, and I don't think I would have remembered to do that.  


I'll have to check out the line-breaks. I'm pretty sure that issue remains. So it's a good time to put in a rule on how my team will be treating that going forward.


This is going onto my priority projects, for sure.


Cheers

Keri Barnhart:

Annotations are so useful, but also so not useful, aren't they?


I was looking at this project but in my analysis of the annotations present on records, they were such a diverse group and a huge number were stale or misleading so that I didn't want to just import them as the summary note. Some of the business rules we used were already handled in the top section (through constituencies, memberships, or deceased/inactive icons), and we could use solicit codes for others ("requests no email", "government official", etc - things that impact solicitation) or train staff to look at a new place for information that had been in the pop-up. Annotations show up in the black box on the NXT record but definitely being able to have the information right under the constituent name is more visible.


What I started to do is export all annotations with the constituent ID, name, preferred contact info (just a snippet to check the annotation) and spouse name/marital status. Then I did some Excel formulas to look for key phrases and sorting to begin identifying stale annotations that could be deleted and ones that should be moved to a better location. The plan was to take care of those, then look at the rest for standardizing to use in the NXT Summary. I never quite got that far because I started with the Organization Match Notes (used similarly to NXT Summary Notes but not visible on the org's record in NXT) and it was a huge headache. Since annotations are still technically visible, it seemed wiser to just let them be until we could get an intern.


One thing that bothered me about the NXT Summary Note is that it didn't preserve line breaks. I'm not sure if that was ever fixed - I mentioned it to Jarod Bonino back in 2017 but it wasn't changed as of last winter, as far as I could tell. That limits some of the utility of the note, since you can't use line breaks to delineate different types of information for quick reference. You'd have to put in special characters like • or | for the visual break, which doesn't lend itself to details.


If your annotations are consistent in the information they display and not too lengthy, I think you'd be able to do the Excel list with formulas to identify and split out the common parts, and another to recombine them in a format suitable for the NXT Summary Note, whether you choose to go with sentences or bullet points.


Best of luck!