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How do you classify your phone types (especially work phone #)?

Nathan Ong

So our parents typically have a cellphone number along with work number to contact them with.

Home is the first/topmost option, but I feel it's maybe a holdover from earlier times when landlines were more common so I don't use this phone type.

I've been using Wireless for cellphone numbers, and there's no option for work phones but I've just been saving those as Business/College since it's the closest thing.

Does anyone else keep parent work contact # saved? Just surprised it isn't an option, unless it's been suggested before. But maybe there's enough overlap that any work number can just be Business type.

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Comments

Coco Parham

@Nathan Ong we also use Business/College for parents work number. I guess it is generic enough for the high school and college template.

Carolyn Stevens

Hi @Nathan Ong -
We 100% use Business/College for work phone. We don't require it, but we store it if it's provided by the parent. As to its use, not only is it an additional contact number for reaching parents, but our Advancement office finds it helpful, especially if they want to encourage matching gifts from an employer who is known to do so.

I want to also speak to the practice of leaving the Home phone field null. We began doing this as people ditched their landlines, too. But we found out that if the teacher uses the roster report (on their class page roster tab), parents who have a null value for home phone, even if they have a wireless number in their profile, show up as blank. My guess (though Blackbaud would need to confirm) is because wireless is not shared with the student and home phone typically is, and that is probably what is behind the old Crystal report.

I am sure there is an idea in the idea portal, but it would be really nice if we could control the labels for some of these fields…

Candace Chesler

@Carolyn Stevens - regarding the Wireless Phone not appearing on the Class Roster - yes - Idea #1861 has been in the Idea Bank since 2016. Currently has 127 votes.
As you said - this report is using a tool like Crystal to drive the output. It would be a simple thing to make a change in the column that displays “Parent Phone” to pull the data from Wireless instead of Home.

Nathan - regarding your initial question. The Business/College label for phones has been in use since before the days when people had personal business phones. That is the field we use for work phones - which is shared with the parent profiles in Raiser's Edge.