Suggestions on Using Actions and Opportunities

Kali Righter

Power Your Fundraising Slides.pdf

If you missed our enablement session on how to Power Your Fundraising with Actions and Opportunities last week, I’ve attached the slide deck, and you can watch an OnDemand recording of the session here.

I also wanted to share some Q&A from the session in case it you had those same questions.

We received requests in the session survey to provide a deeper dive on topics were covered at a higher level in this session like actions, opportunities, workflow designer, work center, etc.

I’d love to hear suggestions from you all on what information should be included in those deeper dives to make them useful to your organization - leave any you have in the comments!

Session Q&A

• Can more than one fundraiser be assigned to a constituent? Yes, more than one Fundraiser can be assigned to a constituent

• When I try to mark a user as a fundraiser, it asks for "Raisers Edge username." Do fundraisers (tagged in web view) have to be users? Yes, to be a Fundraiser in the web view you must have a user account. This allows the system to configure the work center for that fundraiser.

• When using global change to update the assignment of a portfolio of donors to a new solicitor by deleting the previous solicitor – can you update the date assignment instead of deleting it? Yes, you can use Global Change to update the assignment date rather than deleting it completely if your organization would like to preserve the historical record of past solicitors.

• How do organizations handle their regular donors in NXT that aren't necessarily prospects to be assigned to a fundraiser? For example, we typically only assign major givers and prospects which leaves around 100,000 unassigned prospects. Should those all be assigned to our database manager (me)? I would not recommend assigning those prospects to anyone in mass. Unassigned prospects and donors are a vital part of the portfolio management process. Assigned Fundraisers should only be used when that constituent is truly a part of that fundraiser’s portfolio, and they are actively working with them. Otherwise, you can run into a situation where you have so many constituents assigned to a portfolio that it becomes unmanageable and you lose the functionality that makes tools like Work Center so valuable. You should incorporate a regular, recurring process to review your unassigned constituents to ensure that you are supplementing existing fundraiser portfolios with well qualified prospects and donors. You can view and work with those constituents in the Work Center under the unassigned tab.

• You said actions can be edited within a Workflow. Could you please elaborate? Yes – in June of this year we deployed the functionality to allow you to edit Actions in active workflows. If you do not see that as an option, please check your permissions as this is an individual check box within the Workflow designer permissions. If you are still unable to see that option, please reach out to support so they can get that corrected and you can use that feature moving forward.

• When adding Actions, I would like to add them to multiple users’ calendars. I have figured out how to add it to mine, but not my colleagues. Is there a way to do that? There is not an automatic way to do that due to a limitation within Outlook, but you can forward the invite from your calendar to your colleagues.

JoAnn Strommen

@Kali Righter

Be very cautious and test first. Globablly putting start or end dates on solicitor relationships can apply to every solicitor on the record.

Kali Righter

@JoAnn Strommen

Absolutely, that's a great rule of thumb and reminder for using any global feature in the database!

Colleen Carter

@Kali Righter - I'm just finding this thread and would appreciate if there is a refresh to the presentation provided? The slide deck is still available and it's excellent! but the recording has expired. Would be a great way to help our fundraising team start using NXT more effectively as it walks through the process very systematically and provides the right questions to ask to assess our particular needs. I've been taking some BBU classes in the fundraiser series, but this would be great for anyone who wants to get to the heart of the Actions and Opportunities functionality that is so central to using RENXT.