Take Action! – With ActionOmatic

Ask any Major Gift Officer using RE what the bane of their existence is, and nine times out of ten they’ll say, “managing actions.” The one time they say otherwise, it’ll be “lost luggage.” But I digress.

Actions in The Raiser’s Edge^® (RE), while certainly a pain point for many Major Gift Officers (MGOs), are a necessary evil. Actions help you track all of your cultivation efforts with constituent relationships, such as: phone calls, visits, meetings, and more. The actions tab is the central place where a chronology of all communications with a prospect are stored. If your organization has a MGO metrics plan in place, this is often where the metrics are determined and measured.

Actions can also help you prioritize your day with the ability to set reminders for upcoming actions. For the savvy RE user, you can create action records and then link these records together to form an action track. For example, you can form a sequence that consists of emailing a prospect, following up a week later with a phone call, and then sending a greeting card three weeks later. How cool is that? Prioritizing at its finest.

However, actions only work when people are actively managing them. If MGOs hate managing their actions as much as they proclaim to, many times they simply won’t. They may choose to store this information in the proverbial excel spreadsheet, or file everything away in a – gasp! – file folder at their desk (I’ve seen this first-hand). If only there was a way to make entering actions easier. Drum roll please – ActionOmatic to the rescue!

ActionOmatic (AOM) is an action management utility available for download. It offers an easy way to view and manage actions in RE, add or modify notepad content in action notepads, view proposals, and add or edit attributes in constituent records. This information is all listed in an easy-to-view grid that allows you to see everything at once, but also gives you the option to drill down further into a constituent record.

You can access AOM via the macros button on a constituent record. We’ll start by exploring how you can access AOM using queries. You can use individual, organization, constituent, or action queries to access action information for all constituents in a query on one screen.

For example, as a solicitor I could create a constituent query containing all of my prospects. I could then access ALL of these constituents and their actions, notepads, attributes, and proposals all at once instead of searching for each constituent in RE, opening their records up one by one, and then subsequently opening each action, notepad, or proposal one by one also.

Features worth highlighting:

Constituent selection:

• Select any individual, organization, constituent, or action query that you would like to use.
• The blue arrows let you click through all the constituents in the query with ease.

Column header options:

• Right-clicking on the column headers allows you to customize your columns.
• Sort columns by clicking on the column headers.

Clicking the drop-down arrows in the column headers lets you filter the data within that particular column.

Solicitor options: 

• You can add multiple solicitors to an action on the fly.