"Clearing" old, past-due actions

Gabriel Orlet · September 2022

Crux of the problem: I've got many very old actions, not complete but past due, that I'd like to somehow “close” or make inactive, without marking them as actually completed, so that they don't clutter portfolios.

We've got a new fundraiser on staff, and assembled and assigned his portfolio. It looks like there are many actions, created many years ago and as far as I can tell not completed, that appear in his Work Center actions tab as “Past due” (of course). They seem to only be there because they belong to the constituents in his portfolio, rather than the actions actually being assigned to him. When I looked at portfolios for other fundraisers, I also found long lists of these “dead” actions now long past due (past database managers didn't do a great job of hygiene, I've been discovering).

I know I can just have fundraisers “filter” these actions out based on action date or fundraiser, but that just papers over the problem. I don't want to just delete the actions. In NXT, the only thing I can think of is checking them complete, but then using the “thumbs-down” indicator to show that they were not actually done. And then maybe making that explicit in the Notes or Custom Fields section. Does anyone have any better ideas?

Faith Murray · September 2022

@Gabriel Orlet, I've had this problem before at a milder level, where a fundraiser had a few hundred actions un-completed and more than a year overdue when he left. My approach to this has been to consider: why do the Actions still need to be on their records?

An Action isn't about staying on a schedule. After a fundraiser leaves, it isn't even about measuring work performance. The main point of an Action is to remind us of an important interaction that is supposed to take place with a donor. If an Action no longer serves that function (because it is boo-koo years old, pertains to a defunct appeal, etc.) then there is nothing “actionable” about the reminder anymore.

What I did was evaluate the actions. If the action could/should still be completed by a new fundraiser, then I simply changed the date to a future date and updated the assigned solicitor. If the action was no longer actionable, I simply deleted it, and added any relevant info in Notes.

If you decide that you must keep these old Actions in place, because it's critical to see what their original cultivation plan was or whatever, you do have an option. You can create a new Action Type, called “Non-Completed Action”, recategorize them accordingly, then mark them “complete”. By assigning a new Action Type, you can exclude them from any reports or lists that would affect your performance reporting.

Stacy Evans · September 2022

@Faith Murray Faith is correct. It's in the past. In my humble opinion I would delete the ones that aren't crucial to the current task at hand. Any correspondence sent you can keep but phone calls you can delete.

"Clearing" old, past-due actions

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