Recording Contacts (Administrator guide)

Recording Contacts

Recording contacts is the heart of the Charitylog system. When users record contacts, two things are happening;

• Users get a way to log a "case history" and assign work to themselves or others, now or at a later date
• These contacts, and associated information, are recorded for producing reports.

This double-sided approach is key to the implementation of your Charitylog system, and is the reason that Charitylog is intended to be used by everyone in the office, every day - including volunteers, handypeople, and so on! The more people there are making use of the office functionality, the more information is going in for reporting. It is very difficult to have good reporting if there is no benefit in it for the end users. If you were to ask a whole organisation to start logging everything they do, they would rightly complain that it would be far too much work! Charitylog allows the process of logging data to be entirely linked with the process of day-to-day work, so the users of the system benefit by using it.

Templates

As well as simply recording contacts using the "Record a Contact" screen, Charitylog allows you to use templates to fill in information on the "Record a Contact" screen automatically, so users don't have to spend so long doing data entry. You can also take templates a step further and use multi-status templates, which allow your users to pick a progress stage from a drop-down list; the selected status then brings in entries to text boxes, date fields etc.

Setting up a single-stage referral template

Open the Administration menu, then the Projects and Referral Entries submenu, and click the "Referral templates" link.

File:A RAC 1.png

This will show you the existing templates which are set up on your system, if there are any. Click the "Enter New Templates" button to create a new one.

File:A RAC 2.png

From this screen you can enter data for the template;

• Name
• Description (shown on the list of templates)
• Project
• Project subcategory
• Whether or not you want the template to be available on the "Record a Contact" screen
• Whether to always force a Status to be entered (more on Statuses later)
• Whether the template is active.

The bottom half of the page then allows you to enter the information that will carry over to the "Record a Contact" screen. Have a look at the image below;

File:A RAC 3.png

This template will now carry the following information into the "Record a Contact" screen when used:

• The client came into the office for information
• The contact was a self referral
• The contact method was an office visit
• The client needs calling back within 7 days by whoever used the template to enter the information

Saving the template with the name "Office enquiry" for the Information and Advice project will mean that the template is displayed on the project selection page when recording a contact.

File:A RAC 4.png

The resulting "Record a Contact" screen would look like this:

File:A RAC 5.png

Note that the information the template enters on the "Record a Contact" screen is still fully editable - the text is just filled in to make data entry easier, so there is nothing wrong with setting up a template with "best guesses" in. Single stage templates like this are ideal for front desk staff, who will have a lot of contacts with clients, and don't want to fill in the "Record a Contact" screen from scratch every time. You might want to set up a series of templates for the desk staff, with the most common scenarios - for example;

• Client came in for information, information was given, no further action needed.
• Client telephoned for information, information was given, no further action needed.
• Anonymous client came in and took away a leaflet

...and so on.

Remember that these templates are contacts like any other, and as such they must be logged against a Project, so the templates must be set up under the relevant Projects; you cannot move a referral from one project to another once it has begun. Consider the previous scenario where the front desk staff are using templates to speed up data entry. If they are just giving out information, it would be reasonable to log the activity in the Information and Advice Project. However, perhaps the front desk staff also make appointments for other projects to have meetings with clients - befriending, benefits advice, and so on. In that case, one template will be needed in each Project for the front desk staff to use.

Multi-Status Templates

It may be that you want to set up several statuses within a template. This would be used to mirror a chain of actions which are always broadly similar. The two most common scenario is an eligibility process for clients before they access a service. Let's look at a befriending service, and set up a template to make the recording of the initial contacts quicker.

The process that clients go through might go something like this:

File:A RAC chart1.png

To set up the statuses within a template you may like to consider who usually does the work and how long there should be between each action. Here's the flow chart again with these added;

File:A RAC chart2.png

With this information you can now set up the template. Click the "Referral Templates" menu item again (in Administration > Projects and Referral Entries).

File:A RAC 1.png