Name: Blackbaud Grantmaking™: Understanding and getting the most out of Activities
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T16:31:03.818Z
Duration: 54 min 16 s
Description: Blackbaud Grantmaking™: Understanding and getting the most out of Activities

Transcript for "Blackbaud Grantmaking™: Understanding and getting the most out of Activities": We go. Alright. We should go live in one. There we go, and we are live. Seeing some people start to join here. We're gonna give it just a minute, see if those numbers stabilized as we go through here. And then we'll go ahead and get started on understanding and getting the most out of activities. Good morning, Taylor. Thank you for finding the chat. Those numbers are still climbing a little bit. Just gonna give it a little bit longer, and then we'll get started in earnest. Nedrone? I'm probably butchering your name, but good morning to you too. Alright. Looks like we've sort of reached some equilibrium there. Larger crowd than I was expecting, Nick. Always good. It Absolutely. It says we're speaking to a topic that people are curious about, wanna hear more about. So I think that's that's exciting. From Scotland, we're international. I love that. Very good. Alright. Let's go ahead and, get started. I will do some, quick introduction here, and then pass it on to Nick, our technical resource, who's gonna be delivering the bulk of the resources. And then time permitting, we'd love to get on to a little q and a at the end. But if you're here, hopefully, you're here because you wanna understand and get the most out of your activities, capabilities, and functionality within your Blackbaud grant making system. I am Ryan Turner. I am a customer success manager here at Blackbaud. I may be some of your customer success managers. We're, also joined by Nick, an exceptional resource from our services team, and we've got some folks in the back end, who will be helping with q and a. I'll also duck out of this presentation to assist with q and a as we get going. Let's speak to q and a for just a minute. Certainly, if you look over there to the right, you've got the chat, which some of you are already using from a coffee shop in New York City. Welcome, Jen. And then there is a docs section. I believe the only document in there is the customer success enablement page, which is an outstanding resource, especially if anybody here is curious about, more information on the applicant grantee or applicant grantee portal experience. There's a lot on there for that as we're through that transition, but that's not what we're here for today. We're here to talk about activities. And then the last section over there is the question and answer section. That is the best place for you to submit actual questions. If you put them in the chat, they can be lost. And the only other thing I would ask about q and a is when you ask a question because we might not see it or get to it immediately, just make sure you're providing some color and context about what you're asking for. Sometimes we get stuff like, can you dive deeper into what he just said? And we see that eight minutes later, and we're well beyond it, so we're not sure what you were looking for. Some other housekeeping duties, and then I'll stop talking at you. This is being recorded. I do plan on posting this to that customer success enablement page. Also, if you register, whether or not you could attend, you will get a recording, of this session. If you're having trouble with audio or visual and maybe you can't see or hear me if that's the case, but try refreshing your browser. That generally works. But, again, if you're not able to resolve those issues, it is recorded. You will get a recording, and, that should work functionally for you. With that, I think I've talked enough. So I will introduce you, Nick, and we can go ahead and get started. Nick, if you wanna say a word or two about yourself. Sure. Thanks everyone for joining this morning or this afternoon or this evening, wherever you may be. This is understanding and getting the most out of activities in grant making. And my name is Nick Mills. I am a business consultant in Blackbaud's professional services department. I handle things like implementing new clients. I do some data work, some general consulting, doing a lot of work on this new applicant portal that I'm sure everybody has heard about and is working with now. So, general, I I've been with Blackbaud a little over twelve years. And for about the last six or seven, I have focused exclusively on grant making. So hopefully, I'm able to answer any questions you might have. But let's what are we gonna talk about today? The best part. You're in Minnesota, and it's snowing right now. So Definitely in in Minneapolis. It it goes about 75 degrees to snow the next day to about 60 and then snow the next day. We just got about three inches of snow last night. Very sick of snow ready for spring any day now. As are we all. Alright. Sorry. I will stop interrupting. I'll drop off. Nick, take it away. Great. Snowing pollen, but you know what? I would rather have pollen than snow, actual snow at this point. Alright. So what are we gonna talk about today? We're gonna talk about what activities are, gonna go through the different types of activities that are available. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the difference between requirements and to dos. I have some some just sort of general ideas on how you might use activities that you maybe didn't know you could do or things that you can do with activities that might help you, with sort of your your database and your data. I will you you know, when we talk about those ways to use activities, I have a few different ideas that I'm gonna walk through kind of, you know, start to finish. This is how you might set that up if you were interested in using some of that functionality. And then, so I'll have a little bit of a demonstration on how to do that some of that. And And then there will be some time for questions at the end. Again, if you have questions, specific to activities, throw those in the q and a. If, if anybody kind of behind the scenes is able to answer those, they will certainly get you an answer as soon as possible. If not, then we'll have some time at the end where I can answer some of those questions. So, feel free to throw those in, and we will address as many as we can with the time that we have. So what are activities? Activities in the in terms of grant making, they are records of events and information from your day to day work. Things like notes from phone conversations, write ups from a site visit, where a letter was sent, to whom an email was sent, and the contents of that email, if you have received material from a grantee. Those are all considered activities, and there's a log of all of those actions. Some activities, such as when you send a merge letter or you send an email, those are logged automatically. Quite a few activities are automatic. They're kinda done behind the scenes. You don't have to do anything to get that to be associated with the record you're working with. But some of them can also be logged manually when you need to. Activities are frequently used as an audit of your actions. They can also be a reminder of appointments and deadlines. So an exact an an example of an audit of your actions, if you have a grant portfolio and you wanna see, hey. I have published out this requirement form that is due for, you know, x number of grants, you can look at the activities associated with those requests and see which ones have been published. So instead of going in specifically to the request and then into the requirement and seeing if that little button says publish or delete, that's one way to know. There's also an activity that is logged against that request whenever you, publish that form out. And we'll talk about more of these details, but you can look back through those activities to get an idea of what has or has not been done, make sure you didn't miss anybody. They can also be used as a reminder of appointments and deadlines, and that's some of the to do functionality that we'll talk about here in just a few minutes. There are seven main types of activity categories. We're gonna talk about each one of them in a little bit of detail just to get you some familiarity with what these are, what we're tracking, and and how they're used. So the first is document, and that's going to be any external documents that are submitted through the applicant portal, anything that you manually attach to a record, or if you, are generating a letter or a write up, when those are generated, those are automatically attached, in most cases. There is an export category. Let me preface go back just for a second. A lot of these historic, activities, there are a lot of different things that are in those activities tables that are obsolete. We have customers who have been using grant making in its previous iterations. So, GIFs online, GIFs Alta, GIFs installed going back twenty, twenty five, maybe even thirty years at this point. So there's a lot of functionality where some of those activity records were something that could be done twenty years ago, but that functionality is not something that kind of persisted, something that is, you know, we handled it a different way or there weren't enough people using it so that there are, you know, there was no reason to kinda keep that going. So there are some things that are obsolete that will no longer be applicable, and I'll point a couple of those out. The export, really, that just applies to payment exports at this point in time. Grant requirements, that's going to be additional information that you wanna collect from a grantee, in order to kinda fulfill or satisfy that grant. So things like progress reports, additional documentation, grant agreements, those are kind of what we would consider a grant requirement. There are history activities, which is that historic record of various actions taken. There is an import category where there are some different types of imports that, could be labeled with an activity. There are payment requirements, which are very similar to grant requirements, but I'm not sure that everybody really knows the difference. So we'll talk about that a little bit. And then there are those to do actions. So what types of activities can you modify? Of those seven categories, there are four that are off limits. Do not touch document, export, history, or import. If you're in the activities classification table, you have the ability to modify some of these, but it's very important that you do not touch those. The document, export, history, and import, those all have some business logic tied to them, and some other logic within the system. So things like we're going to automatically apply this activity when you do something. There's some of that logic where if you were to change those, delete those, modify them in any way, that could, have some unforeseen, consequences. So, basically, don't touch document export, history, or import. The three that you can modify however you wish, the grant requirement, the payment requirement, and the to do category. And I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail about what each of these are. So, for the types of document activities, there are two that we really see, that are still used. There's external document and that write up. The external document, anytime you attach, an an external document, a PDF, a movie, an image, whatever it is you're attaching to a record that will have that external document activity type associated with that document. Again, with write ups, if you generate a write up, if you are going through the options and you have on the activity tab, you have the create activity record checked, That will automatically attach a copy of that generated document. There is another one in here that is called a hidden document. Absolutely no longer used, but because we have organizations who have been consistently using grant making or gifts online or gifts, in those previous iterations, they may have had some hidden document activities in the past. So while it's not used anymore, we still have to have it in that table so that there you know, people that do have that history are able to, still see that. With the types of export activities, there are actually three listed in that category. And and when I'm talking about these different categories, I'm talking about sort of the the baseline level. This is what everybody who purchases grant making. If if they were implemented today, this is what you would have. That doesn't mean that you don't have different options. Everybody in in this, webinar could have different options in some of these tables, but these are the default ones that, most clients will see that they have. So the consolidation export and the h grant export, obsolete, those had a specific purpose, a long time ago, but they're no longer used. Again, because some organizations may have some of that history from way back in the day using a different version of grant making, they may still have those. They may have some associated activities with those, export types, but those aren't used anymore. The one that we're still there, the payment export, that is used in conjunction with the accounts payable module. That's an optional module that not everybody has, but that allows you to export payments. Then that helps kind of facilitate the the export of information into an AP system. So if you're going from grant making to financial edge or Quicken or whatever it is you use for that accounts payable process, that just helps facilitate that and then importing some of those, check details back. So that's really only applicable to those that have and use the accounts payable module. When you generally export, you know, if you load up a list of requests and you export that, that is not considered an action that logs an activity. So you're not gonna get an activity every single time you export your view. It's just going to be, that payment export will be associated with that request for those payments if you were to export them. Grant requirement activities. These are the default options that, many will have, but this can be modified however you want. So if you are used to working with requirements, you have things that, you want to collect from grantees after you've gotten that initial application, These are your defaults, but we can you can modify these however you want. What we're choosing in this requirement activities list is actually the, what you see in grant making when you're looking at that. What we call these, so board of directors list, final report, financial report. If you add a requirement to your record of one of these, this is something that only you will see. So an applicant is never gonna see what you call these. So you could call these types of requirement activities whatever you want. When we're looking at the grant requirement types, you would go to the activity type classification table. And in the grant requirement category, what we have there is what is listed kind of in that list of requirements. So if I add a final report requirement, I'm going to see that it's a final report requirement type, but my applicants are never gonna see that. They're going to see you know, if I were to publish out a final report requirement form to them, they will see whatever I call that form, but they're not gonna see what I call it here. This is purely internal. So if you have final report, quarterly report, recommendation letter, site visit, whatever types of requirements that you want, you can name them whatever you want in that table, and then that's where you're going to see them. It's kind of in grant making, not the applicant facing side of that. History activities. There are 40, I think, 39 or 40 different types of history activities based on the things that you do. I'm not gonna go through every single one just because there are so many, but these activities are automatically added whenever you do certain actions. So things like transferring a record between branches, considering an application, approving or declining a request, if you send an email, if you roll a request that has been approved or declined back to pending, running tax status verified. All these different actions that you do with your various records will have, a history activity with them. Import activities, those are automatically added when an import occurs. Now there are, a handful of import activities that are listed. Again, this is one of those tables that's sort of, you know, hands off, do not touch. But, the only import activity that is really available for anybody who's using grant making is the checks import, and that's sort of, that's kind of, you know, another part of that accounts payable module. You can export payments, get them over to your AP system, pay those payments, and then if you have that check information, you know, check numbers, whatever that is, you can bring that information back and import that to automatically mark your payments as paid with check numbers and things like that. So that's going to give a checks import activity. Every other type of import is something that only Blackbaud can do. So if you have historic data that you want imported, if you have contacts or organizations that you want imported, those are all things that Blackbaud, professional services can do, and there will be an imported activity record with those. But that's not something that you are able to do yourself. Only that check import within the accounts payable module is available for import activities. So we also have payment requirement activities, and I think this is, something that I'm not a lot of people understand or are familiar with. Very, very similar to grant requirements, but slightly different. Again, these are sort of the default five options that are typically available, but you can modify this however you want. There's challenge match, final report, interim report, receipt acknowledgement, or assigned contract. Now, very similar to the grant requirement, nobody outside of grant making is going to see what you call that type of requirement. It's if you publish something out, an applicant is going to see what you want them to see. Now the unique thing with payment requirements is that you would, apply that to an individual payment. So if I have a request with, say, three payments, but for every single payment, I have something that I need from that grantee before I can release that payment, I can set up a payment requirement. What that does is offer a little bit of additional functionality where if I enable that, I can have a payment moved into a contingent status. A lot of organizations will just say, you know, run me a report of all of my scheduled payments, April 1 to April 15. Those are the ones we're paying this first half of the month. So it's gonna look for scheduled payments. If that status is in a contingent status, it won't pull in with every other scheduled, payment. What that contingent means is that, hey. There's something else that I need before I can release this payment. Once that payment requirement is satisfied so if it's, you know, you need a signed contract from the grantee. You get that back. You mark that payment as done. That will then automatically flip that payment back to that scheduled status so that you know it's ready to go for payments. So there's a little bit of additional functionality where you can kind of, make sure that something is done before releasing a payment as opposed to a grant requirement, which is more, you know, I need this, to kind of fully satisfy that grant. It might be, an interim or final report or something that's not specifically related to a payment, but it is still a requirement. So that that's a neat, sort of additional bit of functionality with payment requirements that you don't have with a regular grant requirement. And, again, you can see here, when you're setting up a payment requirement, you still have to choose the type. So in this case, I've got my receipt required. I've got my due date. But you check that box that the payment is contingent, and then that will then put that payment in a contingent status so that you know, hey. There's something that I need before I can release this payment. Then we have to do activities, and I think this is probably a category that is overlooked by most people. Not a lot of people seem to know that this even exists, or how to use it. But we have four default options in to do activities. These are all manually assigned activities. So none of these are automatically added to any record. What and we've got meeting, note to file, phone call, site visit. Those are for the typical to do activities, but you can do anything that you want. You can add any type of to do activity. If you want to add a reminder for yourself to do something, you could have a reminder, to do activity. You could have any number of things that you want to track. So these are similar to, requirements, either grant or payment requirements, but there's a slightly different intent with to do activities. So what is the difference between a requirement and a to do activity? There is potentially so a little bit of overlap. Requirements in general help you track a deliverable. There's something else that you need. You need that signed contract. You need that final report. You need something from that grantee in order to kind of fully satisfy and close out that grant. To dos, in general, are more to help, sort of track interactions. So I have a phone call. I need to do this thing. I need to do a site visit. I did a site visit, and here are some notes about that site visit. So that's more, more of that CRM functionality where you have, an interaction that you wanna track. So you can go back and see that there's a history of things that you did, related to a particular request. So what are some ways that you can use activities? And I do see, Karen says that they use activities a lot, the to do activities. That is fantastic. I'm hoping that some of these are something that you haven't done, or if you have some ideas on ways that you use activities, or these to do activities that, I don't talk about, maybe throw that in the chat and see, whether people can can, you know, learn from from somebody who does use it a lot. So here are just a few ideas on how you can use activities. So they can be an absolutely powerful tool to sort of keep track of some of your processes, upcoming activities that you need to do, or to inform future action. So a few ideas, a personal to do list. So if you have a a personal to do list, you have these are the things that I need to do this week. You can add a to do activity to your grant portfolio, and then you could create a dashboard that says these are the things that I have to do this week. There's data hygiene. So one thing you could do with activities is create a dashboard to review those activities. Now, if you're not super familiar with activities, what basically the process is, here's an activity, it's open. Somebody does something, they complete that activity, they close out, the requirements, they check that mark done, mark as done box, and that kind of closes that activity so you know that it's been done. There's very likely potential that you have a bunch of activities in your database that are old. Things scheduled years ago that were just never marked done. So they're still technically open, but, you know, they're not they're not done even though it may have been due five, ten years ago. So from a data hygiene perspective, we can create a dashboard that will show us here are all of these activities that are still open, where, you know, the schedule is well past and and we have a, you know there's a bunch of open records that don't need to be open. You can track phone calls. Let's say you have, 50 phone calls that you have to make a week. You could, make an activity, a to do record for every single one of those and have a dashboard to make sure that you see these are the ones that are still open, these are the ones that are closed. You can have two different dashboards to show you, yep, I've made all my phone calls for the week. Another option is to record event attendance. So if you wanted to record who attended an event, who said they were going to attend an event but didn't actually show up, you could record that. You could then use that to send thank you notes to those that did attend, or you could use that to inform future invitations. You know, these 50 people attended my event, so I'm going to invite them to this next event. Perhaps there's a discounted rate for those who have attended before. So lots of different things you can do to track attendance, to track some actions that you need to do. While you're taking a sip of drink there, wanted to interrupt. We've been collecting a couple questions on the back end here. Thought we might ask those, but I also wanted to point out Karen sounds like she's using some activities really powerfully. I appreciate that. Nick, you answered a few of them as we were going through. Really appreciated that, but we did have some questions I wanted to ask. Somebody just was looking for clarification. When you say hidden document, do you mean a document that you have marked as not shareable? Is that sort of the same thing? Nope. So when you have a document, that's gonna be an external document. The shareable checkbox makes that visible in the review report. So that's really the only functionality that it has. If you have a bunch of documents with a request and you have a review that your external reviewers are logging into the reviewer portal to review and and comment on and make decisions on, if you have a document marked shareable, that's when they can typically see that in the portal. So So if you have things like a w nine, an IRS determination letter that you want your reviewers to be able to see, that document needs to be marked as shareable in order to be visible. So that hidden document activity is completely separate. That's obsolete. It's not used anymore. It has nothing to do with that shareable check box. Alright. Very good. And speaking of obsolete, we've got a couple people asking, can we clean up what we see there, the obsolete options? I I would hesitate to say yes. I don't think there would be much impact, but there is some business logic and some general logic on in how grant making works that are tied to some of those things. So if you did remove some of those obsolete ones that we talked about, there's potential that there could be some unforeseen consequences. So I would suggest don't touch it. Just leave it alone. Don't do anything. There there were those four tables that I said don't touch. I would stick with that. Probably safest to just not do anything with those. Very good. Nick jumped in the in the chat there, come up with a way to make the default for docs to be shareable versus not shareable. My guess is maybe that's an ideas bank Things to submit that idea is something you'd like to see in the database. Very good. I see you nodding. Just one or two more, and then we'll get right back into it. If a grant requirement is the same as an activity requirement, will the record update in both sections when it's marked done in one or the other? Is there that sort of connection logical connection there? Does the question make sense? I I'm not sure it makes sense. I'm just not sure that I understand. So you have a requirement, which is a type of activity. So you've got a grant requirement that's added, and you mark that as done. That you know, if you look at your list of related activities, for example, your honor request, you've got your requirements. So here are some requirements, and then you've got activities. The requirements, if you mark a requirement as done, that should be reflected under the associated activities because requirements are activities. It's they're kind of both. So I I you know, in that specific circumstance, I I can't say for sure that one would do the other because I'm not sure I a hundred percent understand, but, I believe so. I think it it's very dependent on that specific situation. I'd have to get a little bit more detail to know for sure. Alright. Let's toss one more at you, and then we'll move on. Can you look for history historical or history activities which show when a grant was withdrawn, I e was awarded but then declined. So there's going to be an activity when you decline. I I would have to look to see if there's one for withdrawn. I that's not really a declination or it's not really a a disposition. There's not one for withdrawn. There's a status of withdrawn, so you kinda know that it was withdrawn, but that would still be a declination. So there would be an activity for that declination. So I would suggest searching for activities with that particular history type of declination, and then you could see and compare against what you're looking at. Very good. Alright. I well, we've got some thumbs up for Raveenit's, question in the in the chat. Can the system automatically assign a grant requirement based on the request type slash status? That is a fantastic question. I'd love to too. So do other people. Yes. It can to a degree. So there's something that we can set up on the back end. It's not something that is accessible through the grant making application. But if you, you know, say every single grant that you approve, if you want an interim report and a final report automatically created. We can do that to a degree. So for grant requirements, we can set up automatic requirement where, based on the start date of that request. So you're going through that approval process. You have a start date of April 2. We can set those to automatically create, a relative number of days, weeks, or months from that date. So if you know that every single request that you approve, six months out from that approval date, you're going to want an interim report, and twelve months out, you're gonna want a final report. We can set the system up. So based on that particular request type, when you approve that, it will automatically create those two requirement records that are due six months out from that start date and twelve months out from that start date. Now keep in mind, that's just the requirement record. If you wanted to actually publish those out, you still have to go into the requirement record and, you know, click the publish to web and choose what you want to publish out to that grantee. But we can kinda take some of that manual data entry of creating those requirements out of that workflow. So if that's something you're interested in, I would encourage you to put in a support case and and just, you know, put in some details. If that's something that we can do, that is something that our our support team will send over to the services team, and we can get that implemented for you. Sounds great. And just a note with that, there's very little flexibility in how that can be set up. So if if the circumstances are perfect, we can make it work. Otherwise, it may not be the best use, but that is certainly an option. And then if we hop into it a little bit clean right now. I think we we've we've reached the halfway mark, and we can keep on going with the rest of the presentation. I'll hop back on late. Okay. So I've got just a couple things. Got two or three of those examples that I gave where you hear some things you can do with activities. I'm gonna walk through kind of the process that I would, recommend for setting up some of these, if you decide you wanna use them. So if we're looking at creating a personal to do list, there are kind of four steps. The first step is determine what kind of activities you wanna track. So, again, we've got those four. There's the site visit, phone call, meeting, something else. I don't know what the fourth one was. But if you if if those are sufficient, fantastic. If you want to add more and have some different types in there, you can absolutely do that. Once you determine what kind of activities you wanna track, then you would want to add those to that activity type classification table. After you do that, you start using those new activities. You create those activity records that are associated with that organization, contact, or request, and you start locking them. You get them into the system. And then finally, you can create a dashboard to kinda track what those to do activities are. So going into a little bit more detail here, that first step, you're gonna set up that personal to do list is, you know, determine what it is that you wanna track. So we've got meeting, note to file, phone call, and site visit. Those are kind of those standard database options that I mentioned. You may have different options in that list. You can create as many as you would like. But those are the four default. So if those are already what you need, then fantastic. Second step, you would want to add in any additional activities to that classification table. Now one note, classifications are something that only client admins can modify, unless you've, you know, modified permissions. But by default, you have to have client admin permissions in order to get to, the classifications and to add additional to dos. So once you've determined what types of to dos you wanna track, we would wanna add them. You go to control panel, classifications, and then activity type is the the the broader table name that has all those seven different categories, import, export, grant requirement, to do, all of those. You would want to then highlight the category and add a new subclassification and then add in those values. So here's a screenshot of that. When you're in classification, you're in that activity type. You would highlight to do and then add new subclassification, and that's going to then bring you here where you add a new activity type. So the parent should say to do. That means that that's what, you know, that category we're adding it underneath. Code, you can certainly add one. It's not required. And then a description, which is required, so that's what you want it to be called. That's the phone call, internal note, reminder, whatever it is that you want to create. And then once you save that and save the general activity table, those two new activities will be available to use. Third step is to start using those new activities. So when you are creating a new activity, if you, are on the activity screen and you click the add new activity button or if you're on, a request, you go to activities, you create a new activity, that's automatically gonna pull up your to do list. So a reminder that if you add something manually, a manual activity, that's not a requirement. So those are handled a little bit differently. But if you just go and add a new activity, that's automatically going to do a to do activity. Every other type of activity is either going to be done, automatically added based on something that you're doing, approving, declining, rolling back to, depending. Or, if you are creating a requirement, there's a process of going through that requirement where you have to go to requirements, you add a new requirement, that will automatically add that activity as well. So everything else is sort of automatic or part of a process, and to do activities are manual. So when you're going through, best practice is to always associate an activity that you're creating, one of those to do activities, with the organization, with the request, with the contact. You don't have to add that, but then that runs the risk of you kind of losing track of it, and it becomes just an orphan record sitting out there not really associated with anything else. So make sure you set the following values, your activity type. So that's gonna be your to do list. Whatever you have in that activity type classification table for to dos will be what's available. Make sure that you add a staff user. That's gonna default to you because you're the one creating it, but you can certainly assign an activity to somebody else. So if you are, you know, managing a portfolio of program officers and they all have their own little subset of requests that they're working on and you want to say, you know, I need to do a quarterly check-in with all of you to see how your portfolios are going. You could create a quarterly check-in to do. Add that as an activity, and then you could assign that to those individual program officers with a due date, and then you'd be able to track who has done this, who hasn't. So that's another option, another, suggestion on how you could use those to do lists. Finally, once you have those to do's set up, you have been using them, you could create a dashboard to help track them. And I will go through a demonstration here in just a moment. But once you have those created, create a dashboard. You're basically just gonna add a new dashboard part, then, choose the type of dashboard part you want, and then follow those configuration prompts. So as you complete your various to do activities, you can mark them done, and then that would clear out your list. So like I said, I am going to do a little bit of a demonstration here. So I'm gonna pull over my sample database. First thing I wanna show in control panel classifications, we have our activity type table. You can't see my screen. I was just I was just coming on to let you know exactly that. Let me fix that. And while you're while you're doing that, I don't wanna I wanna let you be able to get to that. But there was an interesting question I thought that came in. Can you base automatic requirements off the end date of the grant versus the start date? Nope. Start date. That's the only option. It's relative to the start date of that request. Now for what it's worth, I am seeing your your screen accurately. Excellent. Okay. So we're in control panel and classifications, and then it's the activity type table that we want to open. Again, we see our categories. The four that we do not touch, documents, export, history, import, but grant requirement, payment requirement, to do, you can. In to do, I'm going to expand that. You'll see that we have our four defaults, and we also have a reminder that has already been added into this. If I wanted to add a new one, I simply highlight to do, add new subclassification because it's a it's not a top level. It's sort of underneath the category, so a subclassification. And I'm gonna go with my quarterly check-in example. So just make sure that the parent says to do. Code is unnecessary, but you can add that if that's something that you want to use. And then quarterly check-in, going to save. I see it in my list. I want to make sure I save this table. Just kind of a two stave, step process. I see this question that just popped up when I say do not touch even to add a value. Correct. Do not touch documents, export, history, or import. Those all have business logic tied to them. If you added something, it's not gonna get used. There's really no reason to add anything to any of those categories. Certainly, do not remove anything, do not change anything. But if you added something, it's not going to function at all. There's nothing that it's going to do because all of all of those other categories are tied to some sort of business process or business logic. So once we have our to do activity in here, we'll make sure we save everything. And then if I were on a request let me just go find one. And let's just say on this particular request, I want to add a to do activity. I can go to activities, Going to add one. And, automatically, it's going to come up with my staff user. So that's the user that I'm logged in as. My type, here are all of my to dos. So I'm gonna do my quarterly check-in. I'm going to schedule it for the end of quarter two, and then I can save. So now I have my activity. I've got my quarterly check-in scheduled for 06:30. If I were managing other, grant managers or program officers and I wanted to schedule that for them, I could just change the staff, and it would go for them. But then I basically have my activity. Now let's say I want to track these quarterly check ins. I can go to my dashboard, and I'm going to add a part. In this case, I'm just gonna add a table because I wanna see, just a list of activities that I have to work with. So I'm gonna call this my quarterly check-in. And in the filters, we're going to choose activities. And these are the options that come up by default, but you can add anything else that, we've added in, for activity filters. So any any option that you see on that activity. The activity is open is going to be default. That means it has not been marked as done. So it's an open activity. In this case, my class and type, that's gonna list all of my different activity types. So I'm going to go down to my to do's. I'm going to find my quarterly check-in and, done date and due date. I don't necessarily have to worry about these. If I do this, that's just going to give me any quarterly check-in where it's still open. If I wanted to only see the ones that are assigned to me, I could add in staff. We add in staff, and I say, my user, my o seven user. That's just one of our internal Blackbaud users that you typically won't see. But if I set that up and I select, I save. Now I have my quarterly check-in, and for some reason, it didn't show up. Let's see what is wrong. So the activity is open. It is a quarterly check-in, and the staff is me. Trying to think. Let's remove that and see if that does it. There it is. So I must have I think the staff is listing it a little bit different. So I think that's, just a a little issue with my specific user. It has nothing to do with the database, but that would generally show up. So now I have all my quarterly check ins. I can modify this just like I could any other view and decide that these are the this is the information I wanna see. I could save that view, just like anything else. So I can see my quarterly check-in is due on 06/30, and here are any notes. And then when I'm done with it, I just mark that as done, add any notes, and it is done successfully. Go back to my dashboard. That is now closed. If I wanted to see all activities, not just those that were open, I could just remove that activity is open. So now it's just gonna pull in all quarterly check ins. And since I just added that, that's not gonna change anything, but that will now show up again because it's, it is no longer looking at just those that are open. So this would just show all of my quarterly check ins. Let's see. Go back here. Next example. What if you wanna track information that is not on the activity record? So if we go back and look at an activity, this is the default information. Very, very little by default. So you've got some notes, long notes. The notes field is limited to 255 characters. That's a regular text field. The long notes, allows for a lot more text. So I can keep track of this. But let's say I wanted to do something like event management where I wanna see, you know, what is the date of the event? What is, you know, did somebody attend or not? You could create those fields. So activities, just like any other record type, can have custom fields created and added into those using the blueprint module. So this is, a requirement. You have to have the blueprint module. Many organizations do, but not everybody does. You also need to have at least grants manager permissions in order to modify blueprint fields. So grants manager or client admin permissions are required in addition to the blueprint module. This basically walks through the process, so I will do that. So if I go to control panel and settings, go into my blueprint, I'm gonna create a custom field. I'm gonna create an activity field, and I'm gonna call this event date. And when you add date in the at the end of the field name, it's automatically gonna choose that type for you. So let's just say that that's the only one that I wanna add into my activity. So once I've created that custom field, I also have to add it to the blueprint form. And so this may be a little bit more advanced than than somebody who's not used to working with blueprint, may need, but I wanna show that process as well. So once I've created the field, then I also have to put it on my actual activity form in order for that to be visible. So I go back to Blueprint, forms library, I go to activities, and I see I don't have one. It's just using the system default, so I can add a new form. I'm just gonna call that activity, and we'll copy from the system default. Now in here, this should look very similar. That's what we just looked at when I was looking at the actual activity where it has the staff, the type, the due date, some of these default fields, the notes, long notes. Now I want to add my new event date field. That's gonna add that to the very bottom, and now I have a date field on my form. If I save and close that, I'm gonna go back to my dashboard and look at the quarterly check-in. And it's not here, but I just have to refresh the screen. I'm actually I have to close this one out and reopen it because I've got it open so many times. But I open that up. Let's go all the way back and refresh again. Oh, you know what? I forgot a very critical step. When you are in your forms, you must activate it before it will take a fax. So now that I've activated that, that should show up. And refresh. There it is. Event date. Now I have that additional information. So if there are things that you want to track as part of an activity that is not something, that is automatically there by default, you can always add, additional fields if you have the blueprint module. Finally, go back one more time here. If you were interested in setting up a data hygiene dashboard, these are kind of the basic steps. I would create a new dashboard. I would typically use just a table because you just wanna see a list of of, activities. The things that I would suggest, for from a data hygiene perspective, you wanna see activities that are still open, so those that have not been closed. If there is a done date, you might wanna choose is missing. Just to make extra sure the activity is open, there is a done date that is not populated, so that field is missing. And then due date is a relative date. There are a couple different ways to handle dates in terms of some of these dashboards and filters, and let me show setting up one of these dashboards. So I'm just going to create a new part. I'm gonna do a table. We'll just call this my data hygiene table. I can spell. And with the filters, I'm going to go to my activities. I want my activity to be open. In this particular instance, I don't care what type of activity it is. I just wanna see all of those that are still open where the done date is missing. And the due date, if I do some of these top options, you know, on, on, or after, on, or before, after a specific date, before a specific date, between specific dates, then I have to define a date. However, everything below that, so today, yesterday, tomorrow, this year, last year, next year, those are all relative to today. So if I wanted to see everything, in the last year where that is the due date, the done date is missing, and the activity is open, let's see what I get. So I have a bunch of final reports where they were due, looks like last year, October, November, where those are well overdue. This okay. Overdue by a hundred fifty nine days. I might say, okay. You know what? It's time for me to maybe, contact Elizabeth or contact this organization and say, hey. Just so you know, you got this grant requirement. It's still a hundred fifty nine days overdue. Or it may have just been that, somebody deleted the done date, and they just forgot to mark it as done, or or it it came in, but they haven't marked as done. So this just kinda helps you keep things clean. And that is about all I have for demonstration. Were there some additional questions that have come up, Ryan? There are. I think we're gonna the the timing is gonna work really well on this one. Wanted to ask a few more. One of them, I'm very curious about as well. But Sue asked where do these to dos assigned pop up for the user assigned? Does it notify the user like an email or message? Does a bell icon know how many to dos that user has? Like, how does the user see those? That you would have to set up a dashboard in order to track that. So there's not sort of that tickle functionality that some applications have where if you have a due a due date and something that is scheduled for a specific date and time, there's not gonna be a pop up that says, hey. Here are your to dos. You have to do this today. That's where we would say, you know, we need a a dashboard set up. You need it specifically configured so you're looking at your activities, your to dos within a specific time frame. So you could have something like a, you know, my to do activity is this week. You could use this week as a relative date for that due date, and then you'd be able to see everything that you have to do that that week. And it sounds like Karen set that up for her users, so I love that. And then this one, is there a way to create to dos for multiple records at a time on upload maybe? Well, I know you can't import, from the front end, but is there some sort of larger scale way you can do these, or is there are they one offs, essentially? They're they're one offs. Activities are one off things that you can add. Yeah. So all of that would have to be done one at a time. Kinda similar to grant requirements. Those you actually can do in bulk, but, to do activities are one at a time. Very good. And then, the last question that I'm showing and if anybody out there, I saw I see a few people have already dropped off. They got what they needed. They were done. But if you've got any questions, please do keep them coming while we've got just a few minutes here. But then this one is we've noticed that the new grant application portal does not create activities for some actions for which activities were created in the legacy portal. That may be a little off topic, but I was wondering, if you could speak to that at all. I I would suggest that there if if there's functionality that was there with legacy portal where if you did something like consider an application, there there would be an activity associated with that request. That should do the same thing, unless there has been a major change to something. We still have activity records for a lot of the different actions that you would take with the new portal. So if you, you know, publish an additional format to somebody, so you publish a requirement, there should be an activity associated with that. If you're seeing that that is not the case, I would highly encourage you to, enter in a support case, and then we can determine if that's a a bug or or something and get that over to our developers to look at. Very good. And I will just reiterate for those who joined late, this session is being recorded. It will be shared with anyone who registered. So if you had to show up late, you will be able to, view the time that you missed. I think that's everything. I'm not showing anything else. So I think we've done a great job here. You're getting some thank yous, and thanks for, the information in the chat there. Nick, I appreciate your time as always. I know you guys are exceptionally busy. So, with that, we will go ahead and sign off, folks. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks a lot. Tons of kudos coming in for you, Nick. Love to see it. Love to see it.