Name: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Mastering Constituent Records
Uploaded: 2025-07-16T19:02:01.547Z
Duration: 29 min 28 s
Description: Mastering Data Management: Altru - Mastering Constituent Records

Transcript for "Mastering Data Management: Altru - Mastering Constituent Records": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me. So glad you guys are all here. We're gonna get started in just a few moments. I wanna get some numbers up there, give people time to join. Hopefully, you're all having a fantastic day. You're getting ready to have a fantastic rest of your week. Okay. Our numbers are climbing, but I'm going to get started. So thank you for joining me today in this Connect for Success session on constituent records. I hope you guys are looking forward to learning something. I look forward to sharing something with you. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Evan. Hello. Hello. I'm a customer success manager here at Blackbaud, and, customer success managers are here to help you guys be successful and to see values in your products. So we're here to work with you, determine your goals, help you surpass them. We've done lots of these sessions, so I hope to see you in future ones. And thank you, Anna, for saying hello to me in the chat. If you haven't found it yet, the chat is back up in the upper right. Denise, good to have you back. So some of you have found it. You've gone on there. You've said things. Keep going in there. In fact, I would love if you told me a little bit about yourself, like who you are, what you're doing, what's going on at work, maybe what's going on with summer. You can talk to me about your favorite ice cream, which is like my big summer conversation piece. I've mentioned this in many things before, but I recently became in love with an ice cream flavor, called Graham Central Station. It is graham cracker flavored ice cream with bits of chocolate covered graham cracker bits inside of it, and it is currently the reason why I am going to be sick at the end of the summer. I see so many people writing in there. Thank you. Thank you for coming in. It's so good to see you all. Hi, Max. Hi, Courtney, Regina, Kathy, Jacqueline. Hello, Christy. Hello, Laurie. Oh my god. We got people from all over the places. Cathy loves coffee gelato and that sounds delicious. Oh my god. We got a lot of people in here. So I'm glad to see that you guys have found that chat and you're using it. I'm just gonna say that that's the best way to talk to me during this, so use that chat function. It's also a great way to talk to each other. If you ask a question and maybe somebody else goes, oh, this is what I do here and answers it, that is always so awesome. So you guys can get your help from each other. You can help from me. We're all big community right here. Oh, Denise. Ice cream company is at Tillamena. Creamity. Oh my god. I love some good ice cream. I live right across the street from an ice cream place. It is so dangerous. It is it's a problem, to be honest with you. Okay. Quick housekeeping. Right? So this is audio broadcast through your speakers. If you can't hear me, audio check. Use your computer to try to adjust your volume. I do have a document section. It's in the upper right next to the chat. Click on it. There's good stuff in there. Use the cogwheel to adjust your settings, and there's a survey at the end. Please fill it out and say everything that comes to mind. Okay. Let's talk constituents. Right? Customers are often talking to Blackbaud staff about their records. And at some point, they say something like, why do we have this as a constituent record? Like, who is this person? Do I need them? Well, your supporters are constituents. Right? They're all the people that you support, that your organization and your mission reaches out to. There are people who buy tickets, members, donors. They can be the friends of members and donors. It can be just somebody that you added in there for testing purposes. I see those in there all the time. It's up to you what constitutes a constituent. It's up to you how many you keep in there and why you keep them in there, but we are here to help if you have questions about what you should do. So always reach out to your customer success manager if you are curious about that kind of stuff, and we can help you go out. If you don't know who your customer success manager is, it might be me. I'm a customer success manager. But it might not be me, and that's okay too. But if you put in the chat that you don't know who yours is and you'd like to be connected, I will make a point to find out who they are for you and have them reach out to you. So how are constituent records added? Well, there's a couple of ways. Right? There's the most fun way that's automatically. That's where the system makes a record when someone buys a ticket online to a register event or a membership, something like that. And there's the manual entry. That is when, like, a staff at the gift shop or the front desk says, would you like to add this in here? And they they say yes, and they add in all that information. It can also be done at the back office when you're entering list of peoples. Denise, great question. If a host has got buying multiple tickets but they're the only contact information, you're just gonna get information for the host. It's just gonna create one account. So what kind of things can you actually track besides just their name, right, on a constituent record? Well, lots of things actually. And people sometimes don't realize just how much information can be on there, your name, birth date, your info, relationships, employment, the revenue that's there, your sales orders. You can track their educations, lots of communications, events. Pictures are nice. If you can get somebody to pose for a picture and you can put it on there, it's a great way to make sure that you recognize who you need to recognize. There's another way to add constituent records too, and that's in the batch. In a constituent batch, you can manually add multiple constituents at the same time. You'll find that when you go to the constituent record page. There's also imports that you can do a whole list of constituents with, and you can do global changes to make changes to selections of constituents. It's a fantastic way to keep track of things and meet people in groups and things like that, which we'll talk more about. There's also something that not enough people take advantage of called constituent notifications. I love constituent notifications, and they're a great way to put a note on somebody important. You create notes that pop up whenever someone's looking at that particular record. These can be added by one by one to a record or a selection of people. So you can put a selection of people together and say, I wanna have a notification put on all of these people and then you do a global change, add that notification, and boom, bang, boom. Every time somebody opens it up, it says, hey. This person is a huge fan of the gift shop. Talk to them about the sales. Whatever it is you wanna put. There's something about this, believe, in the doc section, so check it out. I'd also like to talk about households. Households help you track the activities and giving of everyone who lives under one roof. The constituent households also help your organization avoid duplicate mail for constituency's share an address. When you add an individual relationship for an individual constituent and the related individual is a spouse or shares a household with the constituent, it automatically creates a record of the constituent household. You can configure whether and how households receive credit, revenue, donations, etcetera, and they should determine whether you recognize the household, the member, or everybody else. Anna, if you're talking about, like, the notes and you wanna know can we add it to just the adults on the same file, it depends on how you create your selection, but your selection could be just adults. One other thing that few people are aware of is sometimes we have things called constituent groups. Sometimes you wanna group people together. Right? For example, multiple constituents might pool their funds together to donate to your organization in a joint effort, or you may have a group of constituents who serve on a committee for your organization. You can add the constituent group to your database. When you add a constituent group, you can enter information about the group, select the members of the group. Each member of the group must be a constituent in your database. If you want to add a group of constituents as a committee, you can use the add a committee to the add a group with a constituency and then just choose committee, and you'll manually assign the constituency. When you add a committee, you can indicate whether or not the committee can coordinate events or solicit revenue, which regular groups cannot be done. Another way to group everybody together is with attributes. Attributes, you can track all sorts of information on constituents, allergies, shoe sizes, mailing choices, other preferences. Add an attribute category and then add that to a record and you can track it. And then you can look at all the constituents with that same attribute. And with global changes, you can add an attribute to a selection of constituents. How are we doing so far? Have I been talking too fast? Have I been talking too slow? Any questions besides the few that I've seen come up and I've answered? It looks like there's something in the q and a that I might have missed. Are any places besides docs and interactions where a notification pop up can be set up? No. That's really the best one right there. And I've seen a couple requests for people that wanna see their customer success manager. I will make sure that your CSM reaches out to you guys. Thank you for being proactive about that. And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to do a little bit of show and tell. So I'm gonna turn off the slideshow for just a second, and I'm gonna do a little show and tell and show you what's going on with my Ultra database so that you can see some of these things in action. Okay. So everyone see this okay? Alright. Looks like it's up on the screen. This is the constituent's tab in a Ultra database. I should tell you this is a fake Ultra database. It is the one that we all play around in, so it's full of all sorts of nonsense. It's nobody's actual data. But in here, we talked about how you can add an individual really quickly, add a group, and then there's areas where you can do some batch entry right here to get something together. And we're also gonna look at the duplicate section really quickly. Start I wanna show you how to add a group, which is something that not a lot of people have done before. Maybe you had a bunch of boys get together and they all donated to you. And you just say, these are great. They're a bunch of college roommates. And they call themselves the friends to the end. How lame are they? This is them. You can put in their description. You can pick a primary contact. And from there, you can say, I want the information to come from that primary contact. Then you can look up all the other stuff you wanna put in here and then you can add other members. That's me and my wife, Carrie Washington. And then you can add any other people that are connected to them. And now they're all part of a big happy group. And you'll notice that in this group of everybody, you can have membership and you can do revenue and all sorts of stuff in here. And you'll see all sorts of information related to all sorts of people in the group. So let's talk really quickly about a batch entry for adding some constituents. Mary, thank you for asking. If your video froze, I do apologize. This is all recorded though, and it should be emailed out to you. If I have some more time at the end, I will go back and do it again, but you guys should all see a copy of this recording. I should have said that at the beginning. Thank you for reminding me though. In this case, we're gonna do a batch template and we're gonna do a constituent batch. And all this is gonna do is let you come through and just add a constituent with all their information. As you go through here, you'll see there's all sorts of stuff in here. Some of it is required, some of it is not, but you can enter all this information and then you can do a bunch more going down. And you can just enter a bunch at the same time until you've got yourselves a huge pile of people. And then when you're ready, you simply just go to the save area. Denise, the question, what is the benefits of batch versus single entries? Well, because batch is all in one area, you can simply just go down. Like, if you've got all the information in front of you and you can sort of just enter them as opposed to enter and then save and it closes out and then you open up a new enter person. So it sort of streamlines it. It makes it a little easier. And, Anna, your question is, can you import a list? And the answer is yes. And there's something about that in the docs section. So once I've saved that, I have this constituent batch right here. I can actually go right over here and I can say, I would like to commit this batch. It's gonna validate it, check for duplicates, create control reports, all things I want because I don't want mistakes, and an error occurred. Oh, no. There was an exception, but that's okay. I wanted there to be an exception because I wanted to see what's going on. But that is how you can do it, and then, of course, it's gonna create a report for me. I do wanna show you guys, though, that you can also look at your committed batches right here. These are all the ones that you've made. This is one I made for a recent Connect for Success session. And you can look back and you can check all those. I do wanna go in and, of course, the mine didn't go through because I didn't enter appropriate information. I wanted to go into and show you guys how you can do with duplicates. So there's a couple of things to look for. There's the full duplicate search and then there's an incremental duplicate search. And then here's we got the merge right here. This is your report of everyone that you guys have looked at. And if you wanna merge two constituents, this is how you start right here. You look for somebody, add it to your target, and then the merge configuration. It's important that you guys are going in here on a regular basis and doing duplicate searches. If you do a duplicate search once, twice a week, you're gonna have two, three people in there. If you do a duplicate search once, twice a year, you're gonna have a lot of people in there and suddenly it's gonna seem like a lot of work and you're gonna wish that you did it way more often. It's only a big problem if you don't do it often enough. On the regular, you're gonna get duplicates. There is nothing that you can do to completely prevent duplicates unless you stop letting human beings use your system. As long as human beings are interacting with your system, they're gonna see duplicates. If I come and I enter information for you and I use my middle name one time and my work email, and the next time I don't use my middle name and I use my home email, the computer is probably not gonna recognize that we are the same person. It's my fault, not your fault. I should have done the same thing every time. I am sorry. But checking duplicates on the regular will keep you up to speed and make sure that everything is working your way. When you go to do some changes, though, for some people, there is something you can do for a group to make a lot of changes. But I wanna show you an individual really quickly. This is a record that you can see with lots of stuff going on. You'll notice that you can see the spouse, my household, a summary of the revenue. You can see my memberships. All this is right up in here. But a good place to look that people tend to not check out is this documentation and interactions. This is a great place where you can see anything that's going on, the prospect plans, revenues, surveys. They're all here, and you can track all of that in here. I'm gonna take a quick second. Has there any questions come up? No questions. Okay. We're moving on then. So let's talk about how you can do a global change to a constituent record. Okay? So if you go over here to administration, and then we decide that we're gonna do some global changes. I wanna add a global change. I want this to be adding a constituent attribute, but I also want you to notice that you can do interactions, mail preferences, solicit codes, and other wonderful things. Mary, great question. If you guys haven't noticed, Mary wants to know she said she runs a duplicate check, no names. And yet when you manually check, there are several. That could be when your the way your settings are set for your duplicate check and what it's looking for. In other words, it doesn't think those are duplicates, but you, who are smarter than the system, do think they're duplicates. So you need to go in and look at your settings on what it's set for. And, if you reach out to customer success, we can show you how to get there. But, also, I believe there's a knowledge based article on your, duplicate settings that will show you how to change it. You can actually add constituencies. But let's talk about an attribute really quick. So you asked though about constituency, Kathy. Look. It's right there. Add a user defined constituency. So I'm gonna do an attribute. Let's talk about all these people. Now in this attribute, you're gonna start by what do you wanna change. So you're gonna want a selection. These are the people that you've gathered together. It's gonna look for all the queries you've done on constituents. Once you've done that, you can come in and say what kind of constituency, like, what category this falls under. Now I am talking about a constituency of everyone who loves the band Fish, and I'm gonna add this attribute to every single person. It'll overwrite any existing values and you can also, like, have it remove things. From here, you just hit that save button and boom, you'll have a global change in there and then you'll be able to manage it and add that to everybody. And it works the same way if you're adding a constituency. When it asks for the selection, you can also create your own selection right here by hitting this button. This allows me to create my selection. But because I'm sharing my screen, it's doing this a pop up that you're not gonna be able to see. But it allows you to create your selection right in here so that you can edit it and make it right on the slide. But I do recommend going in and making it ahead of time so you can check your selection and make sure that you know what you got. You can create a date from and date to right here, and it's the same way. Those global changes right there really will help you manage your constituent records really fast and really well. Okay. So we did talk about duplicates a little bit. I wanna talk about it again. Duplicates are frustrating. It's a problem. We have many resources to help with you. They're in the doc section. So, hopefully, that's been useful to you if you've been out there. Just remember, they happen. The best thing you can do is stay on top of it and be ahead of the game. I had a question for everybody else too. If you guys are passionate about making a difference and you wanna share any success stories with the world, you could become a Blackbaud champion with us. If you join us, you'll have the opportunity to write a blog or a story about how you achieved a goal or made a significant impact on your community. Your experience can inspire potential customers or other customers like yourself. You also have a chance to provide feedback to us in Blackbaud teams and participate in professional development opportunities. If this is something that you're interested in doing, just say, hi. I'm interested in doing this in the chat or in the survey that I'm gonna launch in just a few minutes. I would really appreciate if anyone wants to volunteer, but no skin if you don't. Let's try to talk about how we can make your impact heard though because this is a great networking opportunity for you and your organization. Also wanna remind you that I put resources up in the docs section. It's up in the chat area, but just to the right of it, it says docs. Make sure you've clicked on that and you've looked at all those wonderful things. These all relate to what we were talking about today. And if you are looking to get even more out of your Blackbaud subscription, I do recommend looking into advisory plus. Advisory plus is a one to one consulting design thing that we sell here at Blackbaud. I don't know how much it costs, but I do know that my customers who use it love it and talk about it with me all the time. They do deep experience, product expertise. And if you're interested in having, somebody reach out to you about advisory plus and you're curious about it, please let me know in the chat, and I will have somebody reach out to you and talk about how you could get more out of your current service. I am also going to launch my quick survey here. And your survey is out. And I'd appreciate if you fill out the survey. Let me know how it did. You guys should get a link to everything that's in here. You'll have, access to everything afterwards. So if you were looking, for this stuff to come back, you will, I'll have access to it. I got a request for adding a group. We are just about out of time, so I don't have a chance to go over adding a group one more time. But it it's fairly simple process. And I'm gonna share a doc right now on how to do it. It's in the chat. Thank you guys for filling out your survey. Thank you guys so much for everything that you guys do. I just wanna say that I'm always glad that I get to work here at Blackbaud in the arts and cultural. I think what you guys do for your communities is super important, and you guys are awesome. And I appreciate the work that you guys put out there and the stuff that you do for everyone around us to make the world better. So you're great. I appreciate you. And if there's ever anything I can do to help you, please let me know. I've been Evan. You've been awesome. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. You're welcome, Anna. You're welcome, Ignacio. Bye, Denise. Bye, Taylor. Bye, Betsy. Bye, Max.