Time-saving ways to add employment to a constituent's record?

Jennifer Zalewski
Jennifer Zalewski
Seventh Anniversary Participant
in Blackbaud CRM™ General Discussions
Hi Folks,


My institution converted from Advance to BBCRM in 2018. And now that we can no longer add non-entity business rows/employment to system  --as we could in Advance-- my small team is drowning.  Creating each organization as a record (i.e. having to google the basic info on the company, manually typing it in), updating the alumna/us (employee) information, making the relationship connection-  It can take up to 20-30 minutes per employment row per constituent sometimes. As far as we' know, there is no easy way to batch this type of information in, so it is all manual.


For those of you using CRM --Have any of you developed "unorthodox" ways of getting your constituent's employment information into system that is quicker and more efficient than this standard process?


Thanks for any input!




 

Comments

  • Lois Smith
    Lois Smith
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Participant Facilitator 1
    It takes us 3 to 5 minutes to create a new account.  Adding in relationships would be up to 10 minutes.  


    To ease your pain point, you could use one these or a combination of:


    1) After verifying that the business does not exist in your system, create a special type of account for "Employment Only" and not require full information on the account.  If you get the information later, then add it to the account and change the coding.

    2) Add new accounts and relationship information through batch.  You can import to batch, too.  Maybe maintain a spreadsheet "staging area" and do the import and final items once a week.  

    3) Addresses can be imported, too.

     
  • Kelli Crispin
    Kelli Crispin
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
    We only create new orgs if we will interact with them as potential donors or we are relating 5 or more employees. We have an org record called "Generic Employer" where we add these one-off employment relationships. We put the name of the actual company in the Department field on the employment history record. We have modified reports, as well as the constituent's Employment tile and the way the record appears on out online directory, to display the Department if the employer is "Generic Employer." The only pitfall is that you can't have concurrent active jobs related to the same org. So if someone holds 2 jobs at the same time and both are candidates for using a generic record, you will have to come up with a solution for this. We allow one-off orgs to be created for one of the jobs, and the other job goes on Generic Employer - not ideal, but it's a database constraint we can't get around. (It's also annoying at a university where it's common for a professor in a specific department is also director of an institute and also have 3 other fancy titles. LOL)


    We were live for 5 years before we came up with this solution. We moved all one-off jobs to the Generic Employer, if the one-off org had nothing else on it. Then we deleted almost 70K org records we no longer needed! Just don't go to the Generic Employer record and expect the data list on the Relationships tab to load!


    We have also used a record called "Unknown Organization" and another called "Self-employed." We are moving away from these and moving everything we can to the Generic Employer record, but this is another possibility - generic orgs for different purposes.
  • Tim Lenczowski
    Tim Lenczowski
    Seventh Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1
    Hi Jennifer – I wanted to share that you are not alone with this issue.  I have a couple of customers with similar dilemmas where a custom solution was created.  It is possible to create a feature for a Non-Constituent Relationships.  It involves creating a table to track minimal information about the non-constituent and a custom data list to add, edit, and view the non-constituent relationships on the constituent record.  This feature allows for documenting the relationship but does not require creating a full record in the application for the second party.  Although the non-constituent relationships are viewed in a separate data list, the data list can appear next to the employment history. 

    This is a custom solution but does save data entry time while maintaining valuable constituent knowledge.  Please let me know if you have any questions.


    Thanks,

    Tim
  • Allen Roth
    Allen Roth
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
    You may want to investigate the newish Blackbaud Bulk Import tool. We have found it invaluable for quickly importing and adding relationships.https://docs.blackbaud.com/bulk-import-reference-docs
  • Joseph Styons
    Joseph Styons
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
    Hi Jennifer,

    It's as orthodox as it gets, but I've written a couple of custom batch types that take in a CSV of employees / employers, and creates the employer/employee relationship, including creating the employer if needed.

    Let me know if you're interested, and I can send you some code that might serve as a starting point.


    -J.R. Styons

    https://www.styonssoftware.com
  • Jovana Sanchez-Melendez
    Jovana Sanchez-Melendez
    Tenth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant Facilitator 1

    @Joseph Styons
    Hi Joseph, would you be able to share that code with others? I am having this issue as well.

    Thank you,

    Jovana

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