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Recording WeChat IDs on CRM

Thomas Reaney

Hi Community,

Does anyone have any experience or best practice when recording WeChat IDs on Blackbaud CRM?

I've run into a choice between two less-than-ideal options due to how CRM is configured.

Neither Social Media Accounts nor Phone Numbers are 100% perfect fits for WeChat IDs.

Social Media Accounts: the Profile page URL field is mandatory and force-populates http:// into it. This is annoying and hard-coded (I checked with Blackbaud)
Phone Numbers: if the Country field is populated (presumably pulling through from Primary Address), the Number field force-populates the relevant country dialling code

Having played around with these two options, there are a couple of ways forward:

We use Social Media Account and use the User ID field to record WeChat IDs. We'd need to advise people to put some standard nonsense in the Profile Page URL field (which ultimately won't work / go to a URL) just to allow the ID to be saved
We use Phone Number and advise people to empty the Country field if populated before saving the Phone Number

I wondered if anyone had an alternative approach to this?

Any comments greatly appreciated!

Tom (University of Birmingham, UK)

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Comments

Aaren Ballinger

Hi @Thomas Reaney - you're right, there doesn’t seem to be a great default spot for this under the Contact tab. Your workaround of using a social media account with a placeholder URL sounds like a solid option if you want to keep it on the Contact tab and aren’t looking to pursue any customizations.

Another option might be storing the WeChat ID as an Alternate ID. If it's important for it to appear on the Contact tab, you could store it there and potentially use Page Designer to surface it in the layout.

Alternatively, storing it as an attribute could be a good route—it’s the most flexible option and works well if you don't need it to show up on the Contact tab directly.

Thomas Reaney

Thanks so much @Aaren Ballinger - I had thought about Attributes as well but wasn't aware about the Alternate ID / Page Designer possibility. Ultimately I think it might come down to preferences within our team (although I think there is an expectation that WeChat contact info would display as close to other types of contact info as possible).

Aaron Thompson

@Thomas Reaney It sounds like Aaren's suggestion below about the Alternate Lookup ID might work well for you. You can create a user-defined datalist that shows only the WeChat ID from the Alternate Lookup IDs. Then you can add that user-defined datalist as a new section on the Constituent Contact section. That way, it would be readily visible directly from the Contacts along side social media, emails, phones, etc.

Of course you could also design and build more complex SDK solutions. But if you want something quick, that might work for you!

Thomas Reaney

Thanks @Aaron Thompson, appreciated! I'm going to look into this option.

Sara Anne Boddery

@Thomas Reaney Depending on how you are entering this data, you could also consider using Social Media Accounts and page designer to configure an ‘add WeChat’ button that has defaults built into it for the type and URL so that users only have to enter the ID. The benefit to using something in the contact area like phones or social media would be that you can track contact consent without extra effort.

Elizabeth Johnson

RE NXT user here. I appreciated this conversation and used it to make decisons as we are about to increase our use of WeChat. I went with adding it to our Alias types after weighing all the pros and cons. I'm sharing this here as it is the best thread on community about WeChat and other RE NXT users might come across it as well.