Overview
Tracking donors and contacts by stage can have a meaningful impact on your organization. Use this to forecast things like prospecting, identification, cultivation, solicitation, giving propensities, pipeline, followup, heat levels, and more. Read on to learn how to use Kindful's standard tools to track these types of elements.
Linked Articles:
- Adding a Note to a Donor Profile
- Assign a task (to yourself or other users)
- Create and Edit a Group of Contacts
A General Understanding
You can utilize Notes, Groups, Contact Custom Fields, and Tasks to help manage the tracking of contacts through various stages. Use this to forecast things like identification, cultivation, solicitation, giving propensities, heat levels, and more.
The most common use-case we see with this is to track via contact custom fields. You can begin tracking your contacts using these fully customizable fields, and then you can convert certain subsets of contacts into Groups.
Using these highly configurable mechanisms can allow you to get exactly the right labels to properly identify your contacts.
How to Track Various Stages
Contact Custom Fields
Use Contact Custom Fields to configure your contacts records to your specification. You can setup your fields to be Text, Long Text, (Single) Select, Multi-Select, or Date type. We always advise using Select or Multi-Select when tracking particular values as these are always filterable. Text and Long Text fields are not filterable; however, they are exportable.
Groups
Groups are an invaluable tool when tracking these stages, especially if you are connected to an email marketing program like Mailchimp. When you create a Group in Kindful, that Group label and the associated contacts will be reflected as such in your connected email marketing application (e.g. Mailchimp will bring over/update the contacts in the Kindful Group and give them a Tag which corresponds to the Kindful Group name).
This will commonly be used in tandem with one of your Contact Custom Fields. You can use your Contact Custom Field you filter for to pare down your list of Contacts, and then move them into a Group.
Notes
Notes are going to be a vital part of tracking contacts in the stages they are in. Use Notes to track progress much like you would with a donation. Each note created makes an activity on the contact's profile as well as on the overall activities page. You can filter for and report on these notes, and even set them up to be automatically sent to you using Scheduled Reports.
We advise using a singular campaign for tracking these notes. This will be helpful with filtering for these notes.
Tasks
Tasks are not a requirement to track stages, but they can be a very helpful tool. As you are moving contacts through their stages, you might want to remind yourself or other team members to reach out to the associated contacts. When used in tandem with a Group (for example), you could create a task to follow up with all contacts in the Call Stage Group and assign it to a team member.
How to Filter For It
Filtering for the contacts associated with each of these stages is dependent upon the method which you choose to track these contacts.
Contact Custom Fields
Filter on the Contacts page using the Custom Field Name and the Custom Field Value. For example, you would filter "Cultivation Stage: Call" to find all contacts in this list.
Groups
Filter for Contacts using the "In Group: Group Name" filter.
Notes
Notes are activities and can be filtered for on the Activities page. You would filter "Activity Type: Note" to track this. Add on the "By Campaign" filter to this string to further narrow down your results to just those you are seeking pertaining to the stage tracking.
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