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place in NXT to track affinity interest

Stephanie Hughes

We just moved from a regionally based fundraising model to an affinity model and the AVP has asked all gift officers to review their portfolios and identify a donor's interest areas/affinity (arts/humanities, social sciences, athletics, etc.). We want to capture that on the constituent record in NXT in a way that can be used to generate constituent lists in NXT and can be queried from database view.

Does anyone have any suggestions or documentation of how you've done something similar?

Thank you!

Stephanie Hughes

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Comments

JoAnn Strommen

First thought is how do you define 'affinity'? It sounds like you are referring to their interests, not necessarily their relationship to your org. I would suggest tracking that as an attribute/custom field. I would create a table for description entries for ease of query/filter. It would not have to be limited to one entry per record.

Notes can get messy and are more challenging to query.

If you have the Prospect module there are fields to record philanthropic interests.

Stephanie Hughes

Thank you, JoAnn!

We do have the prospect module and had considered philanthropic interests, but it's my understanding that those cannot be entered/edited from NXT or used as a filter when building lists in NXT. Our AVP wants the information available in NXT in a way that our gift officers can view, modify, and utilize the information to categorize their prospects.

Do you know of a way for philanthropic interests to be editable from NXT?

Stephanie

Dariel Dixon

I'm going to agree with JoAnn Strommen‍, attributes/custom fields is probably the way to go. I would also be leery of having them be editable by too many people. That can lead to the creation of too many similar table entries, or entries that are too specific that they only would pertain to one or two people. I think it would be worthwhile to consider a drop down table as opposed to just having a free text field, as that will make queries and categorization much easier.

Faith Murray

Surprising that you cannot edit the Prospect Interests field in NXT, but you are correct that this is non-editable except from database view. However, I would suggest a different option than Attributes/Custom fields, and go with a custom Rating in your Prospect menu. It's easy to get far too many Attributes per record already, and this would fit nicely under the definition of a Rating. Plus, with Ratings, you get a nice generous Comments box to document your Affinity formula or conditional info so that the rating can be intelligently updated each year (255 characters instead of just 50 text characters).

Stephanie Hughes

Thank you, Faith! We were considering using ratings as an option.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

We track these through Custom Fields/Attributes. It is set up as a table for easy list/query pulling.

Stephanie Hughes

Thank you, Sunshine!

Jeannie Goings

Adding on to Dariel Dixon‍, drop downs will help control the number of attributes/custom fields. If your AVP is expecting granular drill-down, categorizing interests and providing a list of "drill down" values will help keep things organized. For example, you might have a category called sports with drill down specificity: basketball, fishing, football, golf, etc.

Karen Diener

There are some good suggestions here. My only comment is to carefully weigh the need to edit in NXT against the importance of putting data in the most appropriate place possible. Some organizations have opted for easy, which isn't always the best. So while constituent attributes or prospect ratings might end up being your final choice, know that you might be sacrificing the ability to see these ratings in reports or insights. And once the ability to edit interests in webview is available, it is worth evaluating if it might be the right time to move them all to that place.

I'm speaking from years of having cleaned up data that was not put in the place it was intended. That being said, I have absolutely repurposed fields myself. So it is just something to keep in mind!

Karen

Stephanie Hughes

Thank you, Karen! That's valuable insight.

Stephanie