Action Types

Elizabeth De Almeida

Hi All,

Could you share what Action Types you have in your database? At my organization, we want to change the action types we have. It would be nice to see what people are using to code constituents. Thank you in advance.

Patty Lewis

@Elizabeth De Almeida Hi Elizabeth. We recently updated our action types to better align with our KPI's for development officers. We have Non-Substantive, Substantive-Cultivation, Substantive-Stewardship, Substantive-Discovery, Substantive-PrePoposal and Substantive-Proposal Submitted.
I hope this helps.

Austen Brown

@Elizabeth De Almeida - I encourage you consider what will be helpful for reporting on actions. I have seen orgs take many approaches to do this from general subject matter, to moves management statuses and everything in between. I recommend you stay away from action types that include email/phone as those are tracked elsewhere on an action record.

Mark Guncheon

@Elizabeth De Almeida We have action types for our fundraisers and then the rest of us. Our fundraiser action types are the above (FSS = Fundraiser success scoreboard - where we score on dashboards the successes of our fundraisers) ideally based on the flow of moving a prospect.
We also have a few for our Annual programs department and one action type for planned giving.

Joe Moretti

@Elizabeth De Almeida Besides what Mark posted, we also have action types such as Birthday Card, Event Follow-up, Information Update & Change, Newsletter, Invoice, Holiday Card, Report-Grant, Thank You Note, Proposal Submitted, Planned Giving Correspondence to name some. It just depends on what your ORG wants to track

Faith Murray

@Elizabeth De Almeida
It really all boils down to what you want to track. Actions are uniquely well-suited to filtering, especially in webview dash reports, so you can get a bird's eye view of progress and compare performances between staff or between time intervals. They are also the only function that allows you to “calendar” donor or cleanup activities.

We have a massive number of action types (probably time to trim and consolidate actually), so I won't share all of them here. But to give an example of how your reporting needs will dictate your Types, we have different “Stewardship” Types for Planned Giving, Major Gifts, Monthly Donor related, and “Other”. We also have Types to track specific handouts (estate how-to's, etc) that we need to churn metrics for. Also, while I echo @Austen Brown's advice to not duplicate the Action Category, I will say that our fundraisers unanimously asked us to implement a delineation between “Attempted Call” (left a message or unable to reach) vs a successful touch, as this allowed us to better track the work investment of our fundraisers, as distinct from successful interactions.

So, I would say: call a meeting with your fundraisers, your Director, and your data entry staff. Make a list of what performance metrics you want to see on a record that relates to donor interactions. Determine whether Actions are being purposed for extra items like Events, complex conditional mailing campaigns, grants, data cleanup calendar items, or donor survey responses. And then go from there.

Elizabeth De Almeida

I didn't have the opportunity to say thank you to all of your suggestions. They were very helpful. We discussed what we wanted to track. Things like Cultivation, Solicitations etc - we wanted it set up so that both our Individual Giving and Institutional giving can use, without resorting to creating many action Types. We sort of made them universal.