Best Practice for Big-Picture Calendar

Cole Welsh
Cole Welsh
Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering if anyone has some input or examples of how their organization tracks in a high-level overview the yearly calendar for things such as grant submissions, reporting, and individual donor appeals?

Currently my organization is tracking each one in a relatively individual manner, and what I would like to see is a high-level overview where we can look at a month and see at a glance what grant applications are due, what reports are due, and what appeals will be active, in order for us to have a better understanding of our communal bandwidth.

For what it's worth, we're a Google shop, but we've been known to use OneDrive. Additionally, to further throw a wrench in the plan, we do not have the budget for a Premium subscription for Power Automate/Power BI, so we're stuck doing it a bit old school.

Thanks in advance,

Cole

Comments

  • Victoria Potucek
    Victoria Potucek
    Ninth Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Loyalty Badge

    @Cole Welsh - our institutional giving team uses specific types of Contact Methods (proposal, report, etc) to denote steps within prospect plans that are for those formal efforts--although you could also do the same with general interactions if your org doesn't use the prospect tab. Additionally, they have used specific step/interaction name formats to indicate if a date is a hard deadline or a soft deadline. That way, you can a) build a basic ad-hoc query to pull pending or completed steps owned by any number of team members within a date range, and b) each solicitor in Altru can see specific steps/interactions they own in the Pending Activity on their Fundraiser page (note: for this to work, the step/interactions need to be marked Pending, not Planned).

    It won't literally create the visual aid of a calendar, but it will provide a list of deadlines that you can sort or limit by date.

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