Prospect rating total

Imbi Josey

Hi, I've been talking to a prospect researcher at another university who uses sales force as their CRM, and they have the ability to host prospect ratings for linking, interest and ability separately on a constituent record, but also as a combined total. Does anyone know if it's possible to do this in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT / Database view? I want to be able to export the total rating (Linkage + Interest + Ability) in a separate column in a spreadsheet. Currently we have ratings for Linkage and Interest under ‘Ratings’ on the prospect tab (database view) and ‘Ability’ is recorded in the ‘classification' field (under ‘general’ in database view), which has been relabelled ‘ability' at some point, but still shows as classification in NXT view. Any advice/insights would be very much appreciated.

Dariel Dixon

Welcome to the community @Imbi Josey. I think we need to start at the beginning? Where are you getting these ratings from? If they are from an external source, then they can be entered in a number of ways. I would imagine that they are using some calculation to determine the combined total, and are then importing that as a rating, which should be possible. If you have a automatic import going on in the background, you would have to modify it to work as you want.

Imbi Josey

Hi @Dariel Dixon, thanks so much for your reply. We don't currently subscribe to any external providers for prospect ratings. A few years ago, before my time at the organisation, wealthscan was used for awhile but since then no rating have been added at all, manually or via import. For the timebeing, any new ratings I add will be based on desktop research and manually inputted and hence I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up the database to make this work. If budget should become available to subscribe to an external provider down the track, I guess that might require us to reconfigure again to make it work for the new service, which complicates things further. Any advice on how you would proceed or things to consider is very much appreciated!

Dariel Dixon

@Imbi Josey I think I understand a bit better. Since you are using a repurposed field for Ability, you won't be able to export that as a rating like the others as those are different types of fields. What you may want to do since you are manually entering these values is to create a new rating which is the combined total rating and just do that. If you have the total rating, linkage, and interest as numerical values, you might be able to calculate the numerical value for ability in Excel. I'm not sure if it's worth upsetting the apple cart, because that field was repurposed for a reason, and only the people in your organization can determine if that reason has lost it's purpose. I'm not a fan of duplicating data so I don't know if I would create a rating just for Ability. Obviously, all of these fields are going to be exportable, so it might not even be a problem.

I'm sure there is a better way that all of this manual entry, but that would also come with an increase in budget I'd imagine, since these are all ad-hoc searches on your end and not batch searches.