Transcript for "eTapestry's Hidden Treasure - Journal Entry Contacts": Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's, this month's, I guess, session. Welcome to October. Also, hopefully, everybody is enjoying, hopefully, now fall weather. I know sometimes it's hit or miss here in the Midwest. Sometimes it's still summer. Sometimes it is, winter at this time of the year, but, hopefully, everybody is, settling into autumn weather here in The United States and overseas if anybody is, listening in on, on this from, The UK. Always happy to see everybody introducing, themselves and where they're where they're, calling in from or, attending from. This topic here is, one of my favorite things to kind of illuminate people on, if you will. I think journal entry contacts are, your MVP or your unsung hero or the, the goat, if you will, of an eTapestry database. And today, I get to talk to you all about one of my favorite topics, of them all. But, as we are kind of letting people still get in and, still getting, still saying hello and still getting acclimated to getting in on the system. Let's go over a little bit of, some housekeeping here for this session. As always, audio, and video is going to be broadcast through your computer and your speakers. If you end up with any kind of audio or any other kind of technical issues, absolutely, usually just refreshing the browser is all you'll need to do. Sometimes just closing it or reopening it. That is definitely something that we would, recommend you do to, resolve those issues. Now do keep in mind also, these are recorded. So about twenty four hours after the end of the session, you will get a recording. So if you do miss out on anything, now barring if I have technical issues on my end, but if you miss out on anything or if you need to leave early or something comes up or if you have technical issues, you lose Internet or what have you, you'll get that recording, and you'll be able to catch back up. You can always use the chat. It says q and a here to submit questions. I prefer you do chat because that allows everybody to see the question that's being asked, and it also helps people kinda jump in if they know the answer. That's always great to see when people are willing to, to jump in and, to help out with, with answering a question or two or giving some context around how they utilize the, the the system or whatever the topic is that we're talking about. You also have a cogwheel on your screen that should be able to help you adjust, like, anything to make it bigger or to zoom in or what have you. I have a ton of resources for you in the docs, section. So, you should see a whole bunch of different, KB articles and, content there that will kind of cover a lot of what I'm talking about here. Now a little bit of a secret here, I'm going to cover as much of the different things I've recommended people use, journal entry contacts for. That doesn't limit. That shouldn't limit, I should say, what you can use the the contacts for, but I included a bunch of those resources to kind of help at least get the creative juices flowing, kind of help you with some of the entering, some of the, some of the defined fields, some of the various, reports and queries that you could potentially run with that. Of course, as always, I do appreciate feedback. So there should be a survey that will, come, after the session. You know, please feel free to tell me what you think. Tell me, you know, give me some ideas what you might like to see next year as we continue to do these webinars. I am always open for suggestions. I am always, happy to talk about the things that the audience wants to talk about. That's that's one of the key things here with that. Alrighty. So most of you know me. This is almost the obligatory introduction slide, but I'm sure most of you already know who I am. I'm Geoff Arbuckle, the ETAP guy. I'm located in Beech Grove, Indiana. That is a small, little village inside of Indianapolis, and I have a huge comic book collection. I just recently cataloged that. I have over 14,600 comics. That's a grotesque number. Speaking of October and spooky season, that's kind of a spooky number. And I also am a fan of animals, particularly my two cats, Kirby and Sadie. They are both asleep right now, but don't be surprised if you see a tail go across the front of my face here as I'm presenting here. So let's get into our agenda today. So we're going to talk about what are, journal entry contacts. That's gonna be the first thing we're going to cover here in just a moment. And then I'm going to talk about the various key fields that are standard in contact entries, what's required there. I'll also talk about where to add more fields for contact entries. And I will also talk about what's the difference between a note and a contact when it comes to a journal entry. Then, to kinda wrap things up, I will be diving into more tips and tricks, and getting into my database so that you can kind of see what that, you know, what some of the different things you can do with the journal entry contacts. So without further ado, what are journal entry contacts? Now there are two key phrases or two key components of what this is. You see the word contacts. I don't want that to be confused with the idea of, oh, this is how we could potentially email somebody from their account. There is a way to email people directly from their account, but it wouldn't be done here. And that's actually done under the persona if you click on the little email icon next to the email field. Contacts are what the other key part of the phrase is, a journal entry. And this is a way for you to capture and talk, and have something inside the database that you could eventually potentially pull a query and a report on about a particular type of interaction that you have with somebody. Now, the the most defaulted way of, what a journal entry contact would record is going to be like a phone call, a personal visit, talking to somebody, maybe at an event, maybe, you know, jotting down some notes from a email response or from a letter response or just, you know, the the typical idea of how you would contact somebody. Now that's not all it can do, and I do wanna try to save some of the surprise for later. But those that is the general gist of what a journal entry contact is. And to create a journal entry contact, you would click on journal within a constituent account. You can also create contact entries within user accounts, within tribute accounts, but generally, we're going to be talking to our constituents. So if you go inside their account, you click on journal, you click the add button, and you'll see that there is a journal entry option under non transaction that says contact. Now I did mention in the agenda that we will be talking about what the difference is between a contact entry and a note. So hold that thought for the moment. But, you have the ability just directly from anybody's account, just out of the box, create a contact entry for them. But there are key fields that are found inside contact entries within the journal. So what are those key fields? Well, of course, like anything else inside of eTapestry, they're going to be denoted by a red asterisk. So you have to have, which is like with any other journal entry, a date. And that can be in the future. It can be in the past. It can be whatever date that you want to ascribe to this interaction that you had. You have to fill in a subject field. And the reason why you have to fill in a subject field is because the subject line will appear on a journal. So when you, like, or once you save a contact entry and you go into the journal, you can see what that, subject line reads under one of the columns in the, in the journal. And then you must have a method. Now the main reason why we require method now this could be a meeting, could be a phone call, it could be an email, it could be a lot of different things. But the reason why we want you to have the methods that you need, and we'll talk about here in just a moment how those are added, is because the method will say, okay. What was this? Was it a phone call? Was it a meeting? Was it, you know, whatever other things that you could enter in as a journal entry contact, that makes things easier for queries, for reports, all of that. Now what you'll notice here is the note field is not actually marked as required, and there's a reason for that too. But the note field, of course, is where you can put in all of your notes, all of your various different, you know, information about what that meeting or what that conversation you had, in this case with me, was. And, you know, it's just basically where you can jot down those notes. You don't necessarily have to be writing pair your paragraphs or being overly specific, but you're just jotting down the key points of whatever that interaction was. Some contact methods that you might choose depending on what you are, using the journal entry contact for may not have a whole lot of notes. Others, like in this case, I have notes here about meeting with me about raising money for a new building or a new addition to the site, or meeting with me to make a major gift or something like that. Those are the types of notes you may wanna have because you may want to gauge. If you came back to me a month later, you'd wanna be able to look back and say, oh, yeah. That's right. He was pretty interested in that, opportunity or what have you. But it does not necessarily have to be filled in because if you put in a contact like you say, okay. I'm gonna reach out to Geoff next week, you can at least create the contact and you don't necessarily have any notes yet, but you could do that and then come back to the journal entry and fill in the notes later. One thing here is, sir, Michelle did ask, hypothetically, if you do a future date, could you run a report of all future contacts you plan to make? Absolutely. So, you know, when you do a query, and I'll and I'll show a little bit of that a little bit later on when we get into the screen share, you can absolutely put something for a future date because the query can be dated for the future. It can be dated for a single day in the past. It can be dated for a time range including the past and the present or the past and the present and the future. It can be the future. Absolutely, you'd be able to do that. So, yeah. So these are the typical fields that you will find in contact entries right out of the box, right out of the gate when you open up a brand new journal entry contact if you've never messed with them before. So let's talk a little bit about how you can add more contact methods or add more fields to a contact entry. And David, I think you asked that question almost as if you were creating a segue here. So yes. So not only will I talk about it here, I will also go into it in the screen share as well just so that you can kinda see that in motion. And, yes, Cindy. You are right. If you do have several accounts that you wanna add the same contact entry to so, like, let's say spoiler alert. I'm gonna talk about how you could potentially mark a bunch of people as being invited to an event, you can do that with the mass update. So, like, if you have a query of people that you wanna add all of the same, journal entry contact to, a mass update would be able to do that. So yes. So let's talk about adding more contact methods and user defined fields. Both of this is going to be done under the, management menu. Oh, and, I assume everybody is able to hear me. It looks sounds like Olivia may have some audio issues here. Let me just real quick here send a message to her. Alright. Oh, there we go. Fixed it. Perfect. Alright. Great. Alright. So, yes, you would go under management. And under management, you have under database configuration, you have system defined fields and user defined fields. Now this gives me an opportunity to mention what the difference of these two things are. User defined fields, which are the one thing that you almost every database needs to create because databases have, the potential to be, to be made up in a way that is customized to your needs. So user defined fields are the various fields that you yourself are adding to your database. That's like, I wanna add account type. I wanna add, whether or not somebody's a board member. I wanna add what their marital status might be, or whatever the case may be. Those are user defined fields. Those are fields that users create for your specific organization's needs based on what you're reporting on, based on how you're segmenting certain, certain queries or certain lists of, reports and so forth. System defined fields, on the other hand, is a field that everybody has. They are standard to the system. So when you go into the system defined fields, you will find things like contact method, country codes, data source. There are other, listed there that you will have that everybody has inside of eTapestry and they can have various values added or in the case of country code, re enabled because most of the time, all the country codes except for your own home country is usually disabled. So you can go in and re enable which country codes are, you know, where most of your donations come from. But for contact method, if you click on that, it works very similarly similarly to a user find field. You just simply add the value that you want to include and then when you hit save and finish, it will then appear in the list of the various, options that you have, that you have available to you for a contact entry. Again, I'll show that a little bit more in the, when we get into the screen share part where I'm kinda going in through some more of those tips and tricks around these contact entries. Now for user defined fields, they are built like any other user defined field with one key difference and that is you would want the field application to be set to contacts. That will place the user defined field onto the contacts page. So whenever you add a new contact entry, that user defined field would be made available to you. Alrighty. So let's talk a little bit about that difference between journal entry contacts and journal entry notes. Because like I said earlier, when you're creating a brand new, journal entry and you pull up the ads window, you have the, you would have the options for transactions and you have the options for non transaction entries. And both note and contact entry I'm sorry. Note and contact will appear in the non transaction options. So what's the big difference between them? Well, as I showed earlier, a new contact has those additional fields. They have date, they have a subject line, they have a method, and they have the note. And in a contact entry, the date, the subject, and the method are all required. These are ways that you can differentiate the type of interaction you had with that specific constituent. A note, on the other hand, has a date field and a note field. Now you can add additional user defined fields there, but the problem with that is is that the note field is a lot more generic. Right? The method, particularly the contact method, maybe not so much the subject line depending on the subject lines that you use and how much of a, you know, how many different words or how many different, variations of subject lines you might have. In a contact entry, the method is really important and really helpful for you when you do your queries and you do your reports. The note, because it only has date and note, there's a lot of different things that can go into a note entry. So when it comes to notes, notes tend to be a lot more generic. These are things that you would like to know about somebody or something that you picked up on during a, conversation with the person. Like, maybe you could like, maybe if this was a situation where you went out to, you you met with somebody and for whatever reason you went to a restaurant to have this conversation about, you know, raising, additional funds for a new building or an addition to the location that you already have. And the comment was that the the where you where you had that dinner or where you had that meeting had really good coffee. It was their favorite coffee place. Well, that's a note that you might put in as a note because it's something that's nice to know about this. And it could be something you can use later in the other conversation, but it may not be specific or necessary in order to be able to secure the additional funds or the major gift that you're reaching out to that donor for. Now that's just kind of a silly thing that I had off the top of my head. But, you know, you know from earlier that I have over 14,600 comics. That's likely not gonna be something that any one of your organizations, unless you're the San Diego Comic Con organization, that might not be something that would be necessary for you to have as part of a note to secure a major gift from me. But it might be something that you would like to keep and have in the notes or somewhere in a note, whether it's on the persona or in the journal entry, that says, hey. Geoff has this really big comic book collection. I can talk to him about that. I can remember that for a future conversation. So notes let me move to the next slide here. Journal contacts are more detailed. They have more fields. You can query on those additional fields. And these are usually entries that catalog or record interactions and in key important feelings or key important information that helps you secure whatever it is that you're wanting to get, or talking about a very specific interaction. But notes, they can be queried, but are usually created simply for informational nice to know info from your constituents. But maybe not substantive information leading to donations or leading to other, you know, other things like that. And yes, Michelle, notes can be queried by date. And you can also use the note field and content from the note field. The problem is is that because note fields can be so much more varied than say the contact method, you need to really zero in on a specific phrase or a specific word that might be used in multiple notes that you want to pull from different accounts. So that's one thing that also might be important for you to keep in mind that notes yes. You can query on notes based on date. You can query on notes based on the note content. But unlike journal contacts where you can say, alright. I know I had phone calls or personal visits or whatever from the method. Notes can be a little bit more, slip shot as far as what you can what you might end up getting based on what was entered into the note content. Let's see here. In in my example with, journal contact, instead of talk with Geoff and subject, would wouldn't it be better to have planned giving and subject to pull yeah. Absolutely. You could do that. But hold that thought also because here in a moment, we'll talk about some other ways that you might be able to more specifically call out exactly what that interaction was and what that meeting was about. Let's see here. Judith has a great, piece of advice here. Making a UDF for note type to make searching easier, that could work. Absolutely. Like, types like obituary, bio your biographical administrative. That is really, really good. That's a really good option there, Judith, because, the note information I mean, you're not gonna be in contact or have an interaction with somebody when you find their obituary. But what you might wanna do is you might wanna put that in as a note, and then you might wanna have an additional user defined field set to notes so that you can more easily say, okay. Find all of the obituaries from this year or something like that. Let's see here, Stacy. You say here, we would like to add another line, description in our gift information on our journal or on our online donation form. We currently have friend, partner. So that so, yeah, those additional options here, that would be more along the lines of a user defined field, which I'll I'll kind of touch on that here in just a moment. If you wanna update contacts to mark all who attended an event and you need to create a query to start with, wouldn't the constituents are to be marked as attendees to pull on the query? So, yes, Laura. If you're using, like, base all constituents as your, as your starting query, that would be that's why we don't necessarily have to say constituent for the, journal entry or for the, for any user defined fields that we're adding to the journal entry contact screen. Because for the most part, you can add these you can add those fields to any type of journal entry contact. And then when you're doing the query, your starting criteria is going to differentiate whether you're looking at all accounts or just, the constituents. Alright. So, let's now jump into the database here. And I apologize here, there's gonna be a little bit of a jump scare. I have to stop sharing the slides to share my screen. So, you know, you can bask in the glory of my Universal Monsters, shirt here that I have. But let me share screen number two here. And there we are. Okay. So we are inside my database now. So let's talk about first a couple of things that you can do as far as, like, you know, like just the basics of, like, adding a contact entry. So I'm gonna go to my account here. And like I say, once you get into a constituent's account or any account in the system, you go to journal, you click on add, and you'll have contact. So when you click on contact, now you have your new contact entry. And by default, the date will always be set to today. So you can make that whatever date you want. Like I said, it can be a date in the past. It can be a date in the future. It can be today's date. It can be whatever you would like. Now, most of the time, you'll want that date to be applicable to that interaction. So, like, I would typically recommend that if you reached out and called somebody on the fifteenth, that you would set it for the fifteenth. But if it was a situation where it's like you met with somebody last night, you didn't get an opportunity to put into contact until the the next morning, then you might wanna date that in the past. And one of the examples that I used earlier was that, oh, I'm going to reach out to Geoff next week. So you could put out, like, you know, 10/24 as the date that you wanna reach out to Geoff, and you can put that in. And you can later, you can then later use that date in a query to find anybody in the future that you need to reach out to, and then whatever notes you've already taken. But here we have our subject line and we have our method. So all of the stuff would be filled in, you know, however you need to have it filled in, and the method would be whatever the, you know, the method was that you reached out to the person. Okay? To kind of show you that query that I had created and had on the slide here So here's this one from today. Here's the personal meeting with Geoff and all of the information that was, you know, maybe this is you know, I will follow-up to explore further interest, you know, when you do a a report of your visits or of the people that you spoke to, that might be something that you will want to spot when you pull the note field for that, for that for those contacts that you're querying on. And I'll talk a little bit about the queries and the reports here in just a moment as well. But if you need to add additional contact methods, you come up here to management, you go into system database already. And you go into contact method and you just fill in whatever the value is that you wanna add. And when you add the value, it will show up underneath here. Now, let's talk a little bit about why I think contacts are your secret MVP inside your database. Check out some of the other methods that I have here. Of course, I have email, phone, letter, meeting. I also have donor cultivation. So this could be something kind of like moves management. You can have fields in there that will, help people understand what, what step they are along the path towards making a donation or becoming a major donor. I have volunteer. So you can track volunteer information including volunteer hours. I'll show how that's done here in just a moment. I have three event options here. So the people who I invited to an event, people who RSVP'd and said, yes, they are going to attend, and then whether or not they attended or not, these are all things that people can, you know, track within a journal entry contact. When it comes to event fields, I do have a, a document in the doc section that talks about tracking events, and it will talk about really kind of two different paths that you can use to track events. There's the paid ticket events, and there is the option for the, for, like, RSVP free events. Free events are going to be tracked under contacts. Paid events would be tracked under transactions. So just be aware that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily need a bunch of contact entries if somebody is buying tickets to an event. Because they bought the tickets, there'll be a transaction there. But if you are inviting people to a free event, contact methods would be a great way to show whether they were invited, whether they responded, or whether they attended. I also have grant tracking, and somebody asked earlier about planned giving. And I do have a planned gift option here that I'll talk about shortly. Now this DIY form contact, that is automatically created whenever you create a contact form in the DIY form section. So that just identifies that that entry came from an online, an online interaction. They filled out the contact form. So, again, you would just add these additional ones by going into management, system defined fields, journal entry, or I'm sorry, contact method, and then filling in whichever values you want to include. And then, you'll be able to include these additional methods here. You can have as many methods as you want and they will always appear in that drop down menu right away unless you disable them by clicking the enable link underneath the the contact method. Same thing goes with user defined fields. Now user defined fields, I typically recommend that if you're going to use contacts for different types of things, like, beyond just interactions. So you wanna have journal entry, contacts that will be for cultivation information, event information, volunteer information, you know, grant planning, planned gift, and so forth. I would recommend that you create new categories that's done under tasks. You create a new category for those different types of fields. And then within the field itself, you can create new defined fields. Now let's go in here to the cultivation fields here. Somebody had mentioned earlier about a couple of different things. One, why are we selecting the contact as the, field application. Well, let's go in here to cultivation stage. Under field application, you have all of these different types. Now, you could have multiple options here selected, but I typically recommend against that. We typically recommend that you have only one, field application per field. And the reason for that is, is that if you had both constituent and contacts marked, that would mean that this field will now appear on both the defined fields page and within a journal entry contact. What could end up happening is is you end up having, some people who are marked on the constituent's defined fields page and some who have it marked inside their journal entry contact, and that makes things very difficult for it to be queried on. If this is meant to be filled in as part of a journal entry contact, then I would highly recommend that you would only choose contact. And as I said earlier, a query can then differentiate based on the starting query whether you're already looking at all accounts or all constituents to pull the specific journal entries, from those accounts that you want to, you know, use this field for in your query. And I have a little bit of an example of that later. But, somebody else also asked about, like, adding additional options, particularly to their defined fields page. You'd wanna make sure first that the value gets added to the user defined fields. So, you know, to do that, you would go into management, click on user defined fields, click on the category that the field is in, click on the name of the field, and it will take you right to the value step. Make sure that you add the value that you need. You'll click add value and then save and finish to add that value. And then you can go into the, DIY form setup and be able to, you know, make sure that that is an option in the, the fine field at that point that's been added to the page. And support would be able to help you out with that as well. But the same thing goes here. So, like, here, you know, I have cultivation stage and I have a bunch of different options here, that can help identify, you know, what that, you know, what this cultivation contact is, what stage it's in. I also have things like likelihood to give with a number system. You can have that be whatever that you want it to be. And if you come here and see that I have these other types of fields like grant planning, I have, you know, the stage of the grant, whether it was achieved, what the amount was that was being asked for, or what was secured. You can have that in multiple different ways. You can have an amount field for what you asked for and an amount field for what you were able to receive. Conceivably, if you are paying out grants, that would be done under a transaction. Not necessarily you know, that would be under a, a disbursement as opposed to, you know, creating a a gift or creating a contact entry for that conversational stage. But that's, you know, that you can do both. You could have, fields under a, contact entry that will talk about the various different ways, that you might be either receiving or paying out a grant. You know, I know some, schools have had people do their, like, their request for endowments or scholarships and stuff like that. You know, some of the times they have managed that through contacts as well. So all of these, would be done underneath by creating new, you know, categories, creating fields that pertain to that within that category. And then you would be able to create those, you know, that you can have those options available when you're creating your contact entries for that. Now, let's go back to my account here for a second. And let's kind of let's see these in action now. So here, I've I've created a bunch of different ones that we saw the plan visit, you know, the personal visit rather, where, you know, this was the same thing we saw on the slides. I have some notes. The method was a meeting. You know, the the subject line had personal visit with Geoff. You know, whatever the case is. Now under journal, notice that I have included contact method, as well as the description telling us what was in the subject line. The description will always show what subject line is and you can always add additional columns by clicking on this little icon here with this two this like table here. And you can say, I want to include contact method. You check that. You apply changes, and it will now show up here. So you can see, oh, okay. Well, that's the kind okay. That was a meeting. Oh, here's some volunteer information from Geoff. So you come in here and you'll see down here I have volunteer, you know, it's like I have skills, I have availability, I have the hours that I worked or that I volunteered rather. So that would be something that you could pull into a report that I'll show here in just a moment that can calculate the hours and show the hours based on the people who volunteered for that day, for that month, or whatever. Oh, the, yes. So what were the, options that I created under cultivation? Well, let's take a look at that. Let's go down here to my cultivation entry. And I created, you know, like cultivation stage where I had options like identify, engage, propose, donor, major donor. I had likelihood to give, which was a zero to five. I had a giving capability, which I just added some different, various dollar amount options within a text field, really, was all this was. You can have this be whatever you would like, but, and then I added a date field that says what, you know, when did I propose a major gift to this person. You can have a bunch of different fields. It would be what I mean, I kind of made these up a little bit on the fly over the last, few days. There are, you know, any number of fields that would help you with the ability to say, oh, okay. Well, here this is going to be information about a cultivation for this donor. What fields would help me identify or understand what type of donor they are, what their stage is, how much they could give, what are their likelihood, or what's our relationship with the you could add a whole bunch of different fields there that would help you with that. The same thing kinda goes with event. So here I have, you know, my my twenty twenty five spooktacular event. And, you know, I have I've RSVP that I'm coming, so that's the method here. You can edit this directly from here. So if it was originally invited and then you ended up, you know, getting a, a response from me, you can then edit it from within that that invitation contact entry. But you can also see here that I've got a bunch of different fields here for, you know, event information. Like, I have the name, you know, that's just creating a user defined field that's got the event name in there. How many people I'm bringing with me to, or it's gonna be me plus another person. You know, if you have table numbers for events, you can assign a table number there. All of this stuff would be able to be pulled into a report. You know, my table captain, if you have those for your event, is gonna be Count Dracula. It is the spooktacular after all. My guest is gonna be doctor Frankenstein. And then you have, you know, I've got here a dinner option or whatever. So these are all fields that you could have that could be related to an event. Now, so, Karen yes. So if you have to so when you do the event, like, let's say these were just invites right now, and you haven't heard from anybody yet, you do have to come in and update the RSVP status within each contact entry. Now, hopefully, when you send out a bunch of invitations, whether it's via mail or via email, you know, if you send out, let's say, a 100 invitations to this event, hopefully, you're not getting a 100 back all at once. I mean, so Well, yes, you would have to go in and update these individually because, to do a mass update, you would still have to have a query to be able to make that edit. You're likely not gonna really have a query as much as you're going to just have, oh, an email came back or a RSVP letter came back saying, yes, I want to attend. Then I would recommend probably doing that by hand. If you have a massive event, conceivably, you could update that by, you know, by doing a, by doing a mass update. But, you would still need to have a query that would have the people that you want to update. Oh, yes. Judith. Excellent. I'm glad you brought up the user manual. Yes. Underneath the the question mark icon, the very second link is the user manual. You can upload your own personal how to's for your organization there that everybody can access. So if you create like a PDF or a Word document or a notepad document that has the exact steps that you want to have people follow, use that, use that option up there in the question mark icon to do that. Oh, sir. Dion, here it says, if you use a DIY form for ticket purchase, you could require these fields on the ticket. Correct? Yes. So like if it's a if it's a purchase where it's a transaction on the, and even if you do this as a RSVP in a like if you send out an email and say, RSVP for the event, by going to this page, by either, you know, selling a ticket to them or having them fill out an online contact form, you could make the fields on the form required as opposed to being, you know, as opposed to being a, just a field that people might skip over or miss. Alright. So, yes. So this is how events could work. Let me see. I think I still have a So, yes. So plan gift and grant requests. So these are relatively, these are things that people don't realize are something that you can definitely use these contact or these contact entries for. E Tapestry does not have, like, a specific, like, grant tool or a grant or a, plan giving type of tool. Like some of the larger, products like RE NXT has. But you can still track the information here. So like, here in a grant, you know, I have these, fields here. Again, you can have whatever fields you need to track the grant, but I have a method for grant tracking. So that is still something that I can query on. I could put in notes if I want to, but I don't necessarily need to because I have these fields down here. So I can say, you know, what stage was it in? I have identify, engage, proposed, completed. Then I can say grant achieved, yes. And for what amount you could put in. And then when it actually comes in, you would put that in either as a pledge or a gift or whatever the terms were of how the grant's going to be rewarded to you. If this was a grant that somebody was coming to you to send out to them, I know some organizations have that sort of situation too. You could have you could still have grant fields here, and then you could have the money going out of the system by way of a disbursement, instead of a gift or a, you know, or what have you. But you can still track the conversation, track the stage, track all of that stuff within a journal entry contact. Oh, excellent point, Beth. Yes. You could also have, you know, a hidden field as well. So Yeah. So the benefit here of having, planned giving. So let me go back to this here and I'll pull up my planned gift entry. So the reason why there is an advantage of having this stuff in a contact entry as opposed to a UDF. Cons you could conceivably do a UDF. But the reason why I like having it under a contact entry is for a couple of things. One, it already has a date field. You don't have to create a date entry for, you know, when you were notified that there's a planned gift coming your way. You have the note field. So if there's a further conversation around, like, you know, Geoff himself has said that he's left money in his will to this or maybe later, you know, a lawyer contacted us about, you know, dispersing funds from a will to your organization. You can have that historical information about when you were in contact about this planned gift. Those are all additional fields you would not necessarily need to have or that you would have to create, but, you know, would already come to here or would already come with this screen that you wouldn't have to create. In addition to that, you also have the ability to say, okay, well, what was left? You know, you you can have the additional fields there and you can say, okay. What was the date of notification of the planned gift or when's the expected disbursement or whatever? There were really three ways that you could do planned giving. I personally like the contact entry because, like, for me, I'm 48. I hope I don't have to pay out this planned gift in the next few months. I hope I have many years to do that. So if I'm doing that if I'm notifying you now that I put you in the will for a future date, a contact entry would be good to be able to say, okay. Well, you know, here's information about what we were notified about. Like, right here under note, I say that Geoff has given us notification, and I have additional information to fill in. The other options were, you know, to have it on the user defined fields page, which could be there. But with the user defined fields page, you might have to create additional fields that you like I said, you would not necessarily have to create here. Like, you wouldn't necessarily have to have a note field added as a u d f to jot down the notes of this plan gift that's coming up. You, you know, you wouldn't necessarily, you know, there are already fields that are available here under contact that you could use for that, including date. You could have this date instead of this one down here, but these were just examples of fields that I could think of that you might wanna have. So if there were additional pieces of information that you'd wanna have, like the the name of the the law firm that would be handling the will or whatever, or handling, maybe it's not even a will. Maybe it's just a donor advised fund or something like that. If you wanna have information that that is specific around that, you'd wanna put that into this, you know, this one page where now you can always see in their journal that that's something that could be, coming to you. The the third option was always to say, okay. Well, you could potentially put it in as a pledge with a due date that's way off into the future. Like I say, I'm 48. I'm hoping that the due date wouldn't be, like, next year, would be more like twenty five, thirty, thirty five years or forty five years. So, you know, you wouldn't want the you wouldn't want the the if I were to say, I'm going to leave $50,000 in my will or I plan on giving this to you through a donor advised fund when I pass away, all of that stuff, you could put that in as a pledge with a way off to the future due date. But there could I mean, I know some people who have done that and say, well, you know, it's now it's kinda icky that the due date has come and gone and they're still alive. So we're showing them in as being in arrears for something that we're not gonna get until they pass away. And so a contact entry takes away that possibility of here's totaling on their journal what they've not yet given is also included there. Also, with the define fields page, this saves you some creation of steps, or, of fields that you may not necessarily need. Otherwise, because you can put a lot of information up here in the the contact entry itself. And the contact entry will always be something that you'll be able to find in the journal entry as well very easily. So my preference is contact entry. Some other people might see one of the other two options. But I wanted to at least illustrate that these were options that you can use with the contact entry, which, you know, just because the contact entry says contact in it does not limit it to, oh, I have to do this over the phone or I have to enter something by way of an email or, you know, a personal visit or anything. But there are all these different options that you do have available to you as well. Real quick to kind of show you what I've done with a query and how you can pull, information from a contact entry. Let me come down here to In my query, I have this set up as base all constituents as my starting query because these are entries that I put into constituent accounts. I did put the journal entry, or the data return type as journal entries so that you are able to see the details from the journal entry that was filled in. And then some options here of how you could potentially query on things was you can use one of the user defined fields, you can, use the contact method, and you can use the journal entry date. So these are the, you know, these are all different things that can be used for the the query. The journal entry date can be a specific day. It can be day a day in the past. It can be a day in the future. It could be today. It could be yesterday. Whatever the case is. But the idea is is that when you preview this query, you now have the contact entry. Now it's not gonna have any pledged or received information, but you do have this contact entry that is pulled from those pieces of of, criteria. So when I do a report, let's see here. Nope. I don't think that was the right There it is. So here, if I do a report on volunteer hours, what other information I can pull in is, you know, I can pull in the account name, I can pull in the date, what the hours were, what the skills were, or whatever. Whatever the different fields are that you have in that, in that contact entry. And if we were to save and run this, and we select this query, this was the query that I used, or that I showed you here. I had it already saved for me to remember. But if I display the results on screen, this is gonna look a little small probably, but you'll see here I've got my name, the date of the entry, the number of hours. So it says three here. That's for my entry. Now if there were 20 people who all did three hours of volunteer work, it would all list that out for each person. But then at the top here in black, it would show the grand total of those hours that were volunteered that day. So it could be something that can compound and add up if you have those volunteer hours set up as a number field when you create that user defined field. And then it has, you know, what these user defined fields also displayed from that journal entry as well. So, again, just to illustrate that these are things that help you query this type of information while also beholding the, you know, that three hour volunteer to that date. So if I come back the following week and I volunteer another, let's say, two hours, you can have a separate contact entry that has the two hours. And then when you query that and and, depending if you have enough date range to pull in my multiple volunteer hours that I've given, you would have all of those journal entries so that then in the report, it will say, oh, Geoff volunteered five hours over these last two weeks or in the month of October or for the entire year, he volunteered twelve hours or whatever the case is. So all of that is available to you. All of that is possible for you to do within the report, functionality of that. So I know next week, we have our ask the, we have the, ask the expert. Some of the stuff I'm sure I'll go into a little bit more detail about or, maybe more specific questions that I'll be able to answer, but I at least wanted to provide you with that. And now, again, a little bit of a jump scare to see me come back up there, but let me share the slide here. Linda, we are storing volunteer info in UDFs. What would be the best way to switch to using contacts? So depending on what you're storing in UDFs, like some of that stuff like the skills or the availability, that could potentially be stored on the UDF page and not necessarily in contacts. Some of that stuff might still be available for you to store there. As far as switching over to contacts, really all you would need to do is just start creating contacts and making sure that the fields that you want to appear on the contacts will appear there. So it may be a a situation where you go into the user defined field, uncheck constituent and check constituent so that going for or I'm sorry. Uncheck constituent and and check contacts so that therefore, going forward, those fields appear in contacts and not on the, the find fields page. But, there are some, you know, that that would be something that would be, the way that I would do that as far as contacts. As far as the difference between accounts and constituents, so constituents are a type of account as are users and, tributes. Constituents are specifically people that you can add gifts to. So they are your supporters or your people that you are prospecting to be supporters. So that's the big difference between accounts is more of an umbrella term. Constituent is a type of account that does monetary stuff like that. So as far as the tracking volunteer hours, Linda, I if you're not doing that yet in eTapestry, it would just be a matter of creating a number user defined field. There should be one of the, docs that I've included, called volunteer tracking. That should make those suggestions and give you the steps as far as, you know, what you would need to do to set that up so that you can, you know, have the user find fields, have the the fields that you need where you need them to be able to do that within contacts. Alright. So here in, I know we are just at time here, but I do wanna talk about a couple of things here. Of course, we have resources available to you. There is some, some training in Blackbaud University that goes over a little bit more about, like, the different types of journal entries, accounts, you know, database configuration, that sort of stuff that might be handy for you, especially if you're a relatively new user. Customer support and knowledge base, great place to go for step by step information, particularly from the knowledge base or if you run into any issues and you need a little bit of help, with, troubleshooting. And then, of course, Blackbaud community, I always recommend people take advantage of that because that could be a great place where all of you could congregate and kind of talk about the various things that you do with your system and how you are able to, basically help each other with some suggestions and ideas. So that would be a great place for you to go to as well, to possibly, further your learning with, eTapestry. So with that, next week, we will get into the Ask the Expert. So I do want to thank you all for attending. As far as oh, I see these. Let's see here. Is there a place where people share best practices for coding systems? Eleanor, you could, check out the community. You can also, do, I think, if Judith is still here, there is a Facebook group, that, is completely and totally independent of, of eTapstream Blackbaud. Yes. Judith, if you can share that link, that would be most helpful. Don't worry, anybody who wants to join that group. Judith is the, admin of that. I I do not get involved there. I'm not part of that group. So if you wanna say, gosh, that Geoff guy, that shirt of his was ugly. It's, you know, talk about, you know, poor fashion sense or, gosh, he's such a dork with all those comic books. Feel free to do that. But, as far as accessing the community, the community is available. Just go to blackbaud.com. There should be a link to the community in the, let's see here. Let me see where that so, yeah, when you go into blackbaud.com, if you go under the training and support. In the top right hand corner of the screen, there is a Blackbaud community link that you can get there. I just couldn't remember the name of the menu. It's a training and support. So, if you have a Blackbaud ID, which you likely already do because you log in the eTapestry, you'll be able to use that to get into the community and, poke around and, you know, see the various, you know, you can post, topics to the to the message board and all of that. And and that's a great place to kinda get some, some some juices flowing as far as creativity, as far as how other people are utilizing the system. But, yes, next week, next Wednesday afternoon, I will see everybody here for the Ask the Expert where I'm sure I'll get into a little bit more detail here about, you know, about the various, ways that you can utilize contacts. I'll probably even touch upon contact, DIY forms as well because that could be something also where, you know, where you're collecting data or collecting information or getting people to sign up for newsletters, having, like, free events and type stuff like that. That's a great way to do that online. So, so yeah. So I look forward to seeing everybody there next week, and I hope this has been helpful. I hope, this gets some people thinking about different ways that they could store some information like, volunteer, event, you know, planned giving, grant information, stuff like that. Like I say, there's always a way to store that information into eTapestry. It's just finding the way that works best for you. So thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing everybody next week.