Name: Ask the Expert About Journal Entry Contacts in eTapestry
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T18:31:33.866Z
Duration: 1 h 24 s
Description: Ask the Expert About Journal Entry Contacts in eTapestry

Transcript for "Ask the Expert About Journal Entry Contacts in eTapestry": Hello, everybody. Welcome to this month's Ask the Expert. We're going to be, going back into a little bit more about contacts, also, answering any questions that you may have about that. Yes. Doline and, and Addie, welcome. Hello. Amanda, hello. Addie, seeing that, gift of Snoopy makes me wonder, who's all waiting for the, great pumpkin here in the next week or so. But, no, I'm glad that everybody is, starting to settle in and, getting ready to talk a little bit more about those contacts, that we, that we talked about, last week. Hello, Cindy. Hello, Sherry. Sherry, I see you're from DC. I, I'm a big Washington Commanders fan, and I am a little bummed out right now this year. So I'm sure there might be other folks, around you that that may feel the same way. Alrighty. So yes. So as always, this is the Ask the Expert. Last week, we talked about the contacts, one of my favorite, topics to talk about and to discuss when it comes to, like, just there's a there's a lot that can be done with them, and there's a lot of information that you can store. And in particular, one of the key things that they do is allow for, like, a lot of historical information about volunteer hours, about, you know, about planned giving and about, events that people attend or get invited to. And they are just a really helpful tool to be able to record that without having to do a bunch of overriding and rewriting of any kind of, like, user defined fields on the account level. So I do plan on, talking a little bit more about them today. I do have a couple of things I did wanna touch upon that, weren't really that they are related to contacts, but maybe not necessarily exactly the same thing that we had, or not maybe not something that would have been proper, I should say, to have brought up last week when I was talking about just contacts in general. So I will be getting into my database here in just a moment, while people are still getting settled in. Judith, sister Cheryl, Desiree, and, Brendan, welcome. Glad that everybody is here, and hopefully, this will be another really good, conversation around, around pieces of the database. Most of you, I'm sure, already know who I am, but just in case for those who may be coming in for the first time or maybe listening to this at a later date, I'm Geoff Arbuckle. I always put on this slide that I'm the etap guy. That's because I've got just about twenty years now of experience working with etapestry. So I always like to share my expertise in that, in that area. I I will admit that, I am just a few hours away from a, week and a half long vacation. So I am I am, excited to talk to everybody, but also looking forward to when the clock strikes, five and maybe before, before I head out for my, for my time off. So alright. So now that we've got some folks, settled in here, let me pull up my database here. So everybody should be able to see my home page as I'm, getting as if I just logged in. Now one of the things that I didn't really talk too much about, but I did kinda briefly mention last week, was the fact that, yeah, one of the great things about contacts is that there's a way that you can record some of this stuff via an online form. Most of you have probably poked around enough with the DIY forms. But one of the things that you may not have really thought too much about or you may not have delved much into is the fact that when you create a new page, you can create simply a contact page, which allows for you to say, oh, okay. Well, we can collect people who wanna receive our newsletter, or we wanna collect people, who might be, signing up for a very specific type of of a newsletter or some sort of a specific type of communication in general. And then, of course, there's the volunteer page. And the both of these pages create contacts within the donors journal when they fill out the form. And, obviously, with the con or with the volunteer page, there's a very specific purpose that we work behind with this, which is the idea that it is kind of designed to set up a page for people to say, yes. I want to be a volunteer. Any of your volunteer, fields, whether they are, all fields that are put in in terms of a, of, you know, like the contact page itself or maybe there's just some generalized user defined fields on the account that might mark somebody as a volunteer. Those can be collected from that page. And one of the other things to take into consideration as well is while I'm not 100% confident that other people have ever done this before, but one thing that you could potentially do with a volunteer page is use that by way of as a almost like a, for a lack of a better term, a clock in, clock out sort of situation. If you're going to have a bunch of volunteers come in, you wanna record their hours. I mean, you could do that manually by creating, you know, by creating the, a mass update or the individual contacts themselves or, you know, potentially even putting it onto a spreadsheet and creating the contacts from an import. You could also have people do that on a volunteer page as well by just saying, you know, how many hours did you work or how many, you know, like, you know, round it up to the to the nearest hour or something like that. You could have a page like that where people go to the page and they say, you know, I I did volunteer work for three hours today. And it would record that as an entry, and it would record that exact, those exact fields that were filled out as well. So that's something to think about when it comes to the volunteer page. But one of the things about the contact page, this one, much like with contacts themselves, are pretty multifaceted. Not only can you use it to say I wanna sign up for a newsletter or I wanna sign up for a, you know, or for a particular type of of type of, communication or whatever the case is. You could have that as a contact page, but you could also set up a contact page for it to be like an RSVP to an event. It does not necessarily have to be all handled by selling tickets through the event registration form. You can have free events set up as contacts, forms. So these types of forms would allow for you to capture all of those event information because if we were to go in here and let's see here. Free events page. Let me just, basically set this up so that we can now, of course, some of these hidden fields are possible with a, with the contact forms as well. However, if we just create this form like this, like any other type of form, you can add additional fields here by clicking on add item, add fields. And now we can come in here and say, okay. Well, from my event information, I want to, you know, have, like, the name of guests, the number of guests, you know, and that sort of stuff selected so that when they fill out this page, you can have this in whatever order you want. You can say I, you know, I want people to be able to have two guests or or I want I'm gonna RSVP for two guests. And, of course, with anything else, you can add additional, like, text sections, other fields that you might want to collect. But this is one way that you could absolutely set up a free event because with the registration the registration type of page, you have to have tickets listed. You have to sell tickets. You have to have a transactional type of, type of page and type of, checkout for that type of page. There's no way of saying I want to have free event tickets on that type of page, but you can do so on a contact page. So not only are contacts themselves multifaceted and multi, kind of have a a cross functionality, multifunctionality basis to them, but also the contact forms can do that as well. Cindy asked, so you could have a hidden page on the website where volunteers can access and record their time and task through a contact page. Yes. You could potentially have that. I mean, honestly, not only would you be able to have that set up on the, you know, from your website itself to be able to record that information, you could potentially even just say, okay. Well, this part of the website you have to have a login for. And then when they log in, then the page could be found there as well. But you could just say, okay. Well, what if there's just a you know, you just give them the link and that they go on through their phones or whatever and and record that information. Whenever you create a form, technically, it's hidden until you make it available for other people to access one way or another by sharing the link or putting it on your website or whatever. So those are some various options that you could use there. Jolene asked, so can one person enter more than one name for the guest on this form? Can they come back and enter the names once they know them? So they wouldn't be able to necessarily come back. But, like, let's say in this type of situation where you have, like, number of guests and name of guests, what you could have there is you could have them, and this is something that you could add in as, you know, like an additional text section to give some instructions on how to fill this out if you need to. But you could put in there that I'm going to have five guests. Right now, I'm not entirely sure who three of the people are, but here are two of the names and you can fill that into the box here. And then, you know, maybe give them some, avenue to reach out to the organization to give the names or whatever the case is. You could certainly do that. But what I would say is make sure that you have some sort of, text section that kind of explains, you know, what to do if you don't know the names of your guests. And you could also just leave it as not required too. Like, right now, this is not set up as a required field. I could make this field the number of guests required, you know, and I can even change the, I can even change the label to say number of guests including you. So if it's just you, you would just put in one. If it's you and your spouse or you and, you know, some people from work or something like that, you would include that number. And then name of guest in this situation would not be required, and you'd be able to, you know, fill that information in. Now one thing that I will say about setting up a contact type of form, that is a little bit counter to some of the stuff that I talked about last week, is if you notice back in the settings, under page type, there was only a journal entry subject line. There was not a way to select specifically what the the contact method would be. So there is not a way to specifically say, I want this to be an event contact method. So there is a little bit of a, you know, there it would come in as that DIY form contact page, contact method. But you can make the journal contact subject be more specific if you wanna have online registration for an event or something of that of that nature. So just wanted to to give that caveat that while it's great that you can set up the contact form, it may not it's not naturally going to follow your contact methods that you set up under, the system to find fields. But you do have the way to without the without the donor needing to fill this in or without the constituent needing to know what this is being recorded as. You do have the way to make this a very specific contact method that can then be queried on. So I do wanna give that caveat, but it is still possible to say, you know, here's an RSVP page for, event, for this event that we're inviting people for an open house or something like that. No ticket purchase. Nothing like that. You're just recording, like, oh, I'm gonna you know, Geoff has RSVP'd and he's bringing with him four people and we can all query, you know, we can query and and we can get those contact entries and we can report on all of the stuff that was filled in there. Any other questions about the contact forms and some of the things that you might be able to do with them? Honestly and if I'm, you know and and while the caveat is is that it doesn't have the the contact method field, it it fills in its own to show that it came in from an online form. The other thing that you can do is you can always edit that stuff. You can always, you know, go back in and and make the updates to those, including a mass update, potentially. The other thing you can do is you can also you can also, really honestly create a contact form for any type of information that you want to secure about somebody. So, like, you could conceivably send out an email to a bunch of people and say, you know, we wanna make sure that we have your proper contact information. You can have in the email, here's the information we have on file to send you mailings or to contact you about, you know, a donation or whatever. If this is not correct, click on this link and it will, you know, and fill out this form with your new updated information. You could do that as well. So that is so it's not just necessarily, oh, I need to keep this in the con you know, in the constraints of, oh, it's a free event, or I'm just collecting contact information for newsletters, or it's a, you know, it's something that I might have somebody fill out that might be about, volunteers or anything like that. It can be expanded upon to, you know, basically help, you know, get new information about your donors if they have moved or if there is something that has changed about the way that you're contacting them too. So, again, multi multi functional, multifaceted type of page just like contacts themselves. Let's see here. One other thing I'm going to do here is I am going to I'm gonna come into another person's account. I'm gonna go into their journal. And one of the things I kind of showed last week with the, with the different types of, or, like, the different types of contacts that you could have, I had mentioned that the, I had mentioned that, like, you know, you can record, like, volunteer hours in the way that it would display. I, I will come kinda come in here and create a couple extra volunteer hours just to kinda show you how that could potentially, play out as well. Is anyone who fills out a contact page automatically get entered into the database? Yes, Ramos. So the way that would work is it works like any other online form. So what it's gonna do is it's gonna look at the name that was filled out on the form. It's gonna look at the email address. And then it's going to look at the, at the street address for that person. If any two of those three match, it will merge into an existing account. If any if none of them match or it doesn't match enough, it only matches, like, the name because of somebody as simple as John Smith in this case, then it will create a new account. And if, you know, that would also pick up anybody who's brand new. So if I've never been inside your database and I filled out the form, then it would create the account for me while also putting that new contact entry into my new accounts journal. Yeah. So it works just like any other online form when it comes to double checking to make sure for for the various, for the various other folks that are, you know, that that fill out any other type of form, it's going to double check to make sure that is this person have an account or does this person have an account already or is this person new? And so it will it will do the exact same thing as any kind of online form, a transactional form that is. So do the same thing. Let's see here. Let me just fill out here real quick some volunteer hours. Volunteer. And I'll show you how that report will, add up and show you that information here. So got some under John. Let me go under my account here real quick, and I will put in another Oops. Wrong one. Okay. So now when I created a query for this let me go into my We don't need that. And we're going to expand that out to today. And here's my contact method. So, you know, again, we're just using the contact method of volunteer. We're using the journal entry date to look for those entries. So, like, if I preview this, we should see my name listed twice, and we should see John Smith who I just added. There they are. So these are my contact entries. Of course, I can include extra fields if I wanna see more information from that in the query preview. But now if I go over here to the reports, Wait a minute. That was not journal contact reports. That's what I was looking for. So here's my volunteer hours report that I showed last week in the session. You'll see here that, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna group by account and I'm going to show group totals. Okay? So what that's gonna do is it's going to list the person's name. Underneath the person's name, it's gonna have the other information, the dot the date, the, volunteer hours, and, you know, anything else from the contact that I might want to pull. Now remember, it's only going to pull from the account information and from the exact journal entries that the query pulled. So if there's anything that you add on, like received or anything like that, if it's specific to other journal entries in their account, those need to be in the query results as well just like any other journal entry type, query that you might run. But here, we're gonna get the name, we're gonna get the date, we're gonna get the volunteer hours. It's all gonna be grouped by account and it's gonna show group totals. So I'm gonna save and run here. And it should already have my query saved because I remembered that there. But let's display the results on screen, and I'll show you basically how you can see the added up hours. So here we see my name, and then listed underneath, we have the dates that I volunteered. I have the volunteer hours. So under this column, it says that I volunteered five hours today, three hours last Tuesday, and for a grand total of eight. And John, he gave you know, he volunteered today and he gave two hours. And so he has a grand total of two. But at the very top, it adds up everybody's grand total. So if you're pulling a, a big volunteer like, you wanna find out how many hours were, you know, totally volunteered, like, throughout the course of the entire year, this would be a this would be a good way of going about that by just querying on the on the contact entries from that date range, so from this year. And then when you run the report, as long as you include the volunteer hours, you will see that there's a grand total at the very top. So, yes. And, absolutely. And, Cindy, that I'll, reiterate that for everybody too. So, like, if you want the specific journal entries from a date range, you would have that journal entry date because that's a because the contact entry is a journal entry. So, like, here, if we review the query that I did again here, basically, it can be as simple as the contact method or contact, subject line or maybe it's just instead of this, we can do come down here to volunteer hours and we can say greater than or equal to one. So everybody had to give at least one hour of volunteer. And then the date range would would zero in on the exact date range that you want. It could be today. It could be yesterday. It could be last week. It could be all year. It could be all time. And if it's all time, you just you wouldn't need to include journal entry date at all. So it just kinda depends on the on the date range that you want. You can, you know, you can kind of crunch it down to the exact time frame that you want. But the idea is that ultimately, you would be able to not only see each individual person's totals, And if this is grouped by account and not collapsed, you can get the actual exact date. You can get any notes. You can get any other fields that were in each one of those instances. And then you will see the grand total at the top. And then you can, you know, you could also just say, okay. Well, instead of seeing the actual individual date and all of that stuff, so let me go back to the report here. I could say instead of showing me anything that's specific to the entry itself, I can also say collapse groups. And when I save and run this time and display it on screen oops. I hit the wrong button. Submit. Now you'll just see me and John, we have our own individual lines with a grand total of the hours that we gave onto the right hand side with the grand total still listed at the top. So, you know, that's a good way to be able to see totals of what people did from those types of, you know, volunteer hours is gonna be the most common one that you'll do. But it also works very similarly if you have events where you say number of guests. Well, that's gonna work exactly the same way as the volunteer hours. It's just the number of guests as opposed to the volunteer hours that were entered in. So very similar concept on any of the queries that you may run with these different types of journal entry contacts, but it's just gonna be dependent on what date range do you want and what type of contact entry are you pulling this information from so that it can give you those types of grand total. So again, and, like, we could even say, well, instead of volunteer hours, you know, instead of volunteer hours, this was the event RSVP, how many total guests are there? Well, Geoff bringing himself and seven other people, and John's bringing himself and his spouse. And grand total so far, we have 10 guests. Same idea. It's just, you know, a different type of you know, it's just a different it's the different fields from the same type of page, a contact entry. So okay. So Michelle asked, can you go over the step by step of tracking grants in a contact entry? Yes. So one of the first things that you'll want to do when you want to track something, anything inside a contact, whether it's grants, whether it's volunteers, whether it's event registration, whatever. The first thing you need to do is you need to go under management. You'll need to go to system to find fields. You'll need to click on contact method, and you'll need to make sure that the contact method option is there. So in this case, you know, grant tracking, for example. You know, we wanna make sure that something that that calls out whether it's grants or grant tracking or whatever, you'll wanna make sure that that is an available system defined field for the contact method. That way, when you go into a contact entry, you have that to select under contact method. The next thing I would recommend so contact method will be the first thing. Make sure that you have a contact method that helps you identify that that's the type of contact entry that you're adding. The second thing I would recommend under management again is to make sure that you have any user defined fields that you want to set up. I would create a whole new category. So you just create create new category and you name the category. I have a category here selected or already created that I'm gonna select called grant planning. You could call it grant planning, you could call it grant tracking, you could call it grant information, whatever makes the most sense to you. Then when you come in here, you wanna make sure that all of the different types of fields that you want to track for the grants, are added. Now because these are user defined fields, I mean, these are set up like any other user defined fields. Just a matter of making sure that you're selecting the right options when you get to various steps. That is correct, Michelle. You wanna make sure that when you're creating this, when you get into step number two, so like if you're creating a new defined field, step number two is field application. Field application for all of these is contacts, So that it appears specifically on the contact entry. Same thing go again, you know, everything I'm saying is is I'm, you know, I'm using grants as Michelle asked for. The same concept goes for volunteer, for, you know, event information, for, you know, any other type of stuff that you may be tracking within a contact entry. Same concept, just a different category or a different purpose in the end. And maybe different name of the field and all of that sort of stuff, but the same concept. Another thing you wanna be careful of is you wanna make sure that you're always selecting the proper data type for the type of information that you are collecting. So like for example, for grants, if you when you get to the grant amount, you might want that data type to be currency. Now it can be, it can be text, and that's fine if it's text. But you may want it to be especially if you are requesting several different grants or you are receiving several different grants from different people. It might be a good idea if you are setting up for the either the grant amount or the grant, cheat or so the grant amount here, I have it set as currency because then I can type in this is the amount that we received, or this is the amount that's being requested, or this is the amount that's being, sent you know, whatever the whether it's coming in or out, this is an amount field, so we wanna make sure that it is set as a data type of currency because two reasons. One, you could use that in the query to say, find me all of the grants that we have requested that are over $10,000. That's a way that you could query that by using it as a currency field. You could also have it show up in reports and have it calculate just like those volunteer hours. Currency and number work exactly the same. So, you know, so you wanna make sure that you are selecting the proper data type. And of course, the one thing I think sadly gets overlooked a little bit, but one thing I can't stress enough is when you're creating a user defined field, if you're not sure what to select on certain fields, this help section at the bottom of each step is an excellent source of information to say, what does data type mean? And it will list all of the different types of data types, and then tell you how it would ultimately be displayed. You know, and what it can accept when you are create or when you're entering something into that field. Another thing to be mindful of is whatever you're dealing with numbers or currencies, when you get to step number four, the display type, you'll want it to be a text box, not a multi select or a multiple choice type of option. You'll want that to be a text box so that when you type it in, you're typing in, like, okay. It's one point five hours or it's $15,000 that's being requested or whatever. It that will be something instead of you having to come up with all of the various different types of values that somebody could you know, like, if you end up with a grant that's not a it's not a round number, then it's always going to be best to type it in as a text box. Now don't let the idea of text box fool you just because it says text box. That's just saying this is what it looks like. It looks like something you type into. You're still creating a, a currency field. You're just typing into a currency field in the layout that looks like a text box. So that's so number one, make sure that you have your system defined field for, contact methods set up with the information that or with the type of contact that that's going to be. Whether it's a grant, whether it's volunteer, whatever. Step number two, you wanna make sure that you're setting up what fields you want to collect. Now, granted, I'm I'm working from the database expert guy. I'm not necessarily, and I also now I kinda set some of these these fields up in a hurry just to kinda show that fields can be created and they can be filled out on the, form. Maybe, the idea of having a stage where you have various different values like, you know, you've identified somebody that you might want to reach out to. You've engaged them. You've you've made a proposition. It's been completed. You know, maybe that is something you would want for a grant. Grant achieved is just the ability to say, you know, yes, no, or it's on hold or it's in the in or in progress or something like that. Of course, that could always be put into stage as well. And grant them out. There may be 20 other fields that you can think of that might be good for you to do. But you'd wanna make sure that they're all created so that when you get to an account, and I'll go back to my account here. Step number three of the process is going to be going into the journal and being able to actually fill out the contact entries. So when you come in here and you click on add and you click to create a new contact, now you can fill in and you can put in whatever subject line you want. Now it might just be as simple as saying, grant request. It may be grant request dash here in Indianapolis, the Lilly, Lilly Corporation, you probably have seen ads for Lilly. They're the they're one of the, pharmaceutical companies and one of the big ones. It's here in Indianapolis. They hand out grants left and right. I wish they handed out grants to private sector people because I could I could use a little bit of the Lilly money, but that's that's a story for another time. But the you know, you can put in whatever you want within the subject line. The key thing will be to make sure that you're selecting the proper method because the method is going to be more it's going to be easier for you to query on the method or other user defined fields than it will be the text fields of the subject or the note. And as you are, you know and of course, you can put whatever notes you want in there. You can put whatever subject line. That can all be pulled into a report. But in the query perspective, that's why you wanna make sure that your method and your other user defined fields are set up first. So that then you can come down here and say, okay. Now, I want to say, for this I've identified that this person could give us a grant. And then once you save that, and with whatever other notes, whatever other information you have, of course, the fourth step will be the query and the report side of it, which is simply going into a query category. And when you get into new query, you can come down here to journal, and you can say let's see here. No. Wait. It's not. Let's see here. Under define fields, not journal. Sorry. I went to the wrong category. Under define fields, you can select contact methods and you can say, I wanna find all of my grant tracking contacts that have, that were from with the journal entry date, from whatever range. And then you could, you know, you could stop there and say, okay, these are all the grant entries I put in, but you could potentially go one step further and say, I wanna make sure that they are all in the identify or they're all in the proposed stage or something like that. And that would be then how you would be able to to collect those up into a query, which then you can go into the report and very similarly, when you're in a report oops. Let's see here. That's where you can select your various fields with your, you know, that you want to display. So, like, the account name, the, stage it's in, the grant amount that's being asked for or whatever, or that was received. So it's it's really a four or five step process. You know, you wanna make sure that your management side, your database configuration side is set up. So step one is making sure that the contact method's put into system defined fields. Step two is making sure that you have your user defined fields that you want to collect. Now later, you may decide to revamp or add more fields or, you know, change the way that you're you're you're getting this information recorded. That's totally fine, but you at least wanna have something to start with that can help you identify that. Step number three will be the actual going in and entering in the the journal entry and selecting the various fields that are, required. Step number four will be then you can query. And step 4.5 or step five would be then to make sure that you're selecting the various fields that you wanna pull out into the report. I do believe that we do have at least the first two or three steps covered in a KB article. I think in last week's session, I think I did include a grant tracking help document or KB article that talked about, like, you know, making sure that you have your, system defined field set up and and have your user defined field set up as well. Those should also like, the setting up a user defined field should link to a help document for setting up user defined fields as well. So that will probably more or less cover the same thing that I that I did there, at least up to the point of adding the information in. Beyond that, it's just at that point, just kind of knowing how to query on specific defined fields or specific journal information to be able to pull that stuff out as well. You're very welcome, Michelle. Hopefully, that, at least that should give you a place where you can start. Of course, you know, the you can always reach out to support. And, like I said, there's probably going to be maybe a combination of knowledge based articles that will get you all the actual physical steps to, like, the query and so forth. But so at least a good start. Alright. Any other questions about contact entries or how we might be able to enter some information into the database. Trying to think if there was anything else that I could have talked about. Oh, and like I said, when when a online form entry comes in, I can show you what the method would be there. When a on you know, like, when somebody fills out a contact oh, yeah. One moment here, Michelle. Let me, yeah. Absolutely. I'll, come back around to that here in just a moment. So go go ahead and and, put something into the chat. That's quite alright. I think we have a little bit of time for that. So, like, if you were to receive something online, the contact method that will appear is going to be this DIY form contact. However, like I said, this can always be updated after it's been saved. And then the other thing you can take into consideration also is the ability to update existing contacts through the mass update. So, like, if you were to put out a contact page where you're collecting information for an event, for like an RSVP for an event. You can then say, okay. Well, let's get a query that's got all of these online form contacts that have this contact method. And now I can come in here and I can, you know, I'll select the query, and then I will say assign, and I will select the method that I want it to be. So maybe, event accepted or event RSVP'd or something like that. Accepted RSVP in my mind kind of work the same way, but it depends on how you want to do that. And then you can do the mass update where it will change all of those, through the various you know, you can you can have that change through all the various ones that you receive online within a date range or with specific information that might have been filled out on that page. Additionally, if you have a query of a bunch of people that you invited to an event, you can also create new contacts by saying, I wanna create a contact. I'm gonna use, you know, whatever query it is. So let me, under base. I have a query just for myself. And then, you know, for the date, we'll put in the date of the exact event itself. We'll put in event invited. We'll put in I keep changing the name of the event, the spooky event. I I don't know why I keep doing that. But, but then you could say, okay. Well, you know, whatever other, you know, event information that you want to select. Maybe I maybe you invited me and a buddy. Geoff, here's, here's you and a plus one to come to this event. You've sent that through an email. You're just waiting for me to come back and say, yes, I will. But you can do the mass update here to say, you know, all of these people in this query got invited to this event, and you can date the, the contact method for the date of the event. That is one thing I tend to recommend to people, but that's totally up to you. It's just what makes it easy for event contacts is that they all have the same date. So that's one thing to, consider. When you go into preview, it will tell you how many contacts are going to be added. And then now, once that is updated, let's go over to my account again. And when I go into journal, you'll see now this has been added with the contact method of event event invited with the event name listed and all of that stuff. So that's kind of how the mass update works. The only caveat to a mass update is you have to have a query of the exact people or the exact the exact people you want to add the contact to or the exact contacts that you want to update if you're updating those. So that's just one thing to to keep in mind. Alright. So looking back at Michelle's question there. So while if any other questions come up here, what if there's more than one account to apply soft credit to? Example, ABC accounting firm donate $600, and we want to assign a soft credit of $600 to partners Smith, John, and James. We would like to be able to do this when entering the donation data, but currently, it only allows one donor to be assigned soft credit. Want to be able to link this donation to each partner in its full amount. So here's how you can do this, actually, Michelle. Split the donation three ways, assign each member $200 in soft credit if we want their soft credit to match the hard donation, or split it three ways and assign a soft credit of $600 each time allowing our soft credit to be more than the initial $600 hard credit donation. So, Michelle, this is how you would do it. So when you are in a journal so let's say I made this, I made the $600 donation and you want to soft credit multiple people, what you can do is you can do a split transaction. What a split transaction says here is it gives you this basic stuff upfront. Right? The date, the amount, if there's a non deductible, and how many segments you want. And if you want it all to be one gift type. So, like, if it's a transaction or something like that. So or, like, if it's a check that you received for this transaction or what have you. So here you can say add segments, and now you have three segments here. Now the total is still $600 for this transaction. But what you can do is you can put it in as $200, and over here under, gift time, you can put in whatever the check information is. Under here, under the oops. I keep missing the there it is. Here, you can put in a soft credit for this segment. Come down here, do another segment. And then under here, add another soft credit. And then same thing for the three for the third segment. So split transaction is what you'd wanna do. You can have I mean, a split transaction is handy in two different ways. One, this this exact scenario where you have maybe three different people that you're gonna soft credit into one transaction. Split it up and then you can do whatever segments that you want. The grand total is still $600. The soft credits will then be credited whatever amount that you put in for the soft credit on their on their account, on their end. The other purpose that this is for is I say I'm gonna give you $600, but I want $500 to go to this fund, and I want $100 to go to this fund. You can do a split transaction for that as well. So yeah. And due to few so in that type of situation, the other option would be is if you say, okay. Well, we don't wanna put in $600 and then fully soft credit the entire amount to each individual partner. I agree that what you would probably wanna do is you'd probably want to evenly split the partners, you know, and what the amount is that they are soft that they're soft credited for just because I think that would be more I think that would be more fair and more accurate to say, okay. Well, yes. As a trio, they were soft credited through, you know, $600. But individually, it probably should be broken up so that is even, and that it equals the amount that it came in. If you do want to soft credit more than what the total amount is, the other option would be create the gift, and then individually create the soft credits under each of the partners accounts. And then at that point, it doesn't really matter what the soft credit amount is. It won't be tied to that gift specifically. So that's the kind of the third option. But if you went to split transaction route, I would generally recommend that you when you search for the person that you soft credit, probably equally just that's probably a little bit more fair. Yeah. And yeah, Judith. I I agree with that too. If if you're wanting to give the full $600 to each individual partner, unlinked soft credits would be the way to go. Yeah. Judith coming in out of the bullpen for a save there. Thank you. Since we're in the World Series part of the month now, so I guess I can use a baseball analogy. My team didn't make it, but that's alright. Yeah, well. Any other final questions here? Yes, Michelle. I'm I am rooting for the Blue Jays as well. I am, I was I'm a Phillies fan. Phillies fan and Commanders fan, which is very odd crisscrossing of East Coast, fandoms there. But, yeah. Not I I know there's a couple of folks here from, that are yeah. Adi, I know you're in LA rooting. I I can't. I'm sorry. I just can't. Any final questions here? We still do have a few minutes. Oh, yes, Judith. Being being an Indianapolis guy, I have known many, many, many suffering Cubs fans. Actually, most of my most of my friends in high school were were suffering. Well, now, Teresa, I can't pity a Mets fan. That would be very anti Philadelphia Phillies, rhetoric for me. So I'm sorry. Alright. So if any final questions come in, please go ahead and, put those down there. But let me go back to the slides here. Yes. And yeah. San Diego, I have feeling, are just about as tired of the Dodgers as, as the rest of the National League is. Yeah. Alright. So let me just come back here for a second just in case while other questions come up here. As always, definitely recommend taking advantage of each of the resources that are available. All of these can be accessed through blackbaud.com in various different ways. Blackbaud U, great place to go for, your training needs. You know, there's also the on demand, there's the on demand, options as well as the live courses. Customer support and knowledge base, great ways to, do any kind of troubleshooting or any step by step kind of technical assistance. And then, of course, the community is a great way for everybody to kind of, you know, just get to know each other kind of, you know, maybe ask some questions out into the, into the ether and see if anybody would have any ideas or any kind of brainstorming that might help you, be more successful with your, Blackbaud products. In this case, it would be eTapestry. That is monitored. So, like, if something gets put in there, if if a questions get put in there, if somebody from the, from the wider community doesn't respond, we do have community folks who go in and try to help out as best they can. And I have been known to be called in, to help out with some questions as well. So that is the, you know, so those those are four really great places. I would like to see people get a little bit more active in community sharing their ideas, sharing their, you know, their various, you know, their various ideas and the ways that they use eTapestry. Now, Geoff, I yes. The expos, when I was growing up, the Indianapolis Indians, our triple a team here, we were the farm team for the Montreal expos. So, I do have some affinity to the Montreal expos. I always loved that m that cursive m logo that they had. That was always great. Love that. Yeah. And I miss the expos too. And I I know there's some, expansion talk, but but I don't think the expos are coming back, and that's a shame. One more thing I, always like to talk about too are there are programs here that will, also help you engage with not only us, but with your peers as well. We have, like, our Blackbaud champions. If anybody's interested in potentially, learning more about the champions, this is not a particularly heavy lift. It is it it's a program in which you are more than welcome to join up for and kind of, you know, help not only talk about the various products that you use from Blackbaud, Possibly even help spread the word if you're interested. But unlike the reference program, it's a relatively light lift in terms of you participate in the programs and in the situations that you want to participate in in the program itself. And there are some, development opportunities that you can take part in. There's, there's even like a, like a kind of reward system where you can earn points and be able to cash those in for various, items and and, trinkets and what have you. If you are, interested in joining that, please let me know in the chat. I'll be more than happy to nominate you as a champion. Those are always a great way to, you know, also have a direct line to folks here at Blackbaud as well as other Blackbaud users from various other programs potentially as well, whether they're using r e n x t, f e n x t, or any of the other blackbaud products. The reference program, little bit heavier of a lift. This is where we might be talking to a potential prospect that might be interested in purchasing, eTapestry. They might be asking for somebody who you can reach out to or who they can reach out to to kind of ask some questions about the ways that you've used it. If you're interested in the reference program, you know, again, also let me know. I'll be happy to nominate you. You have total control over how often you speak to a a potential prospect, whether that's, you know, you always give yourself, you know, once a week or once a month or once every other month, whatever the case is. You have total control over that cadence. And then we also have the spotlight of your success. If you're ever interested in possibly joining me for a webinar where we talk about something that you've been quite successful with or stuff that you've done in the program, you know, let me know. I'd be happy to, figure out a way that we can schedule something as we look ahead into the 2026, schedule of events that I'll be probably thinking about quite a bit. I agree, Judith. I think that might be an idea there. So maybe we maybe we talk about that when I get back at the November. So, yeah. Maybe that that might be a good idea. But, you know, again, if you're interested in any of these, please let me know. Be happy to, to either nominate you for one of the programs or figure out something that we could potentially talk about on the on a webinar like this. So with no other questions, I think we are at the end of today's session. Of course, at any point in time, if you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to customersuccess@blackbaud.com. We're always happy to help. And, if we are, not able to answer your question, we'll make sure to get you to the right, place and be able to, get you the answers that you need or or solve any problems that you may be running into. But, thank you so much everybody for attending. I am, looking forward to, finishing up today. I'm headed up to Chicago for the weekend for a transformers convention. So I'll be, surrounded by a bunch of bot heads. So, hopefully, everybody, has a great rest of your day, a great rest of your week, great, weekend ahead, and hopefully, everybody has a fun and safe Halloween next week. So thank you so much, and I look forward to talking to you next week where we'll talk about or next month, rather, where we'll talk about, some end of year, tips and tricks as far as, your end of year, you know, emails and and various calls to action that you might be sending out, to to drive a little bit more, donations towards your organization. So thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day, and talk to you soon.