0:00  
Hello, everyone. Oh, I love this. Hello from all over

0:09  
Colorado Springs, I'm actually up in Frederick, Colorado. And Laura, where are you?

0:16  
I am in Logan, Utah. So representing the West Coast, I guess. Yeah.

0:23  
The West

0:28  
Oh, wow from Israel.

0:41  
Pro Services team. Hello.

0:47  
Go AQIS.

0:50  
This is so fun

0:57  
Awesome. Well, it looks like we have kind of hit the steady marker point

1:04  
for folks joining in, and it's about five after.

1:08  
So let's go ahead and get started, I think.

1:13  
So thanks, everybody, for joining the workshop today, just in general want to give a brief agenda outline, pretty standard. But we will be introducing ourselves right after this. touch a little bit on housekeeping. We'll also touch on what we are going to cover today.

1:34  
And of course, why you all came? So we'll be focusing on the big question in the room. Why is data cleanup so important? Why is it important to keep your neon CRM system clean. So we will be touching on best practices for your data database cleanup projects. Laura has put together a fun angle to this, which is always exciting, and how neon serum can help. So we'll spend a lot of time taking a look at in the back end of neon.

2:05  
And then q&a. So we do have some folks from our team joining. So we have Aiden, Hannah, and David. And they are going to be answering any of the q&a questions. So again, just like many of these webinars, feel free to go ahead and insert your questions into that q&a or chat discussion. We'll be sure to answer those.

2:32  
So there we are, I will go first. I'm Sam, I am the Product Marketing Manager here at NEON. I have been with neon for six years. Now prior to coming to the marketing side of things I was actually on the sales side. So maybe have worked with with some of your organization's previously. But excited to walk through today's webinar. And I'll hand it over to Laura. Hi, my name is Laura. I'm the product owner for neon CRM started that job this year and previously was on the professional services team for about three years here. So I'm sure I've worked with some of you. And before that worked for a handful of nonprofits in fundraising and marketing.

3:23  
Yeah, so it's just some some basic housekeeping rules. Not really rules. But number one, this is of course going to be recorded. After today's walkthrough, we will be sending you a follow up email, which the recording will be included inside of that email. And then you can always find any of these webinars on our neon one.com website page. Under resources, you can click on events and webinars. And you'll see kind of the whole gamut there. And we will be taking questions as mentioned. So please locate the q&a in the chat box at the bottom there. Thanks, David. And then we're going to be focusing of course on practical usage. So Laura is going to take us on the back end of neon CRM, which mostly hopefully all of you are familiar with, and walking through different ways for data maintenance and cleanup. And then after the discussion today, we'll be sharing some further resources, just about data maintenance, some of our data pen services, your way afterward. So he handed it over to Laura to take it away. Thanks, Sam.

4:36  
Yeah, so just wanted to give a quick overview of what the plan is for digging into the CRM today.

4:43  
First of all, starting out with a couple tips and tricks and suggestions for planning a database cleanup project, just gleaned from doing a number of these projects myself and working with all of you to do similar things in the past. Then sticking with the cleaning

5:00  
theme, we're gonna go straight into decluttering the database. So I really want to talk about managing your fields and lists which can get kind of unwieldy or less useful over time without some regular maintenance. So especially focusing in on the individual and company type fields, and your custom fields. I also want to talk about relationships in the database at this point too. So just want to review the types of relationships, best practices, and how to keep them maintained and working well for you. Then, once we've decluttered, we're getting into kind of tidying up and getting back to a really clean database. So we're going to talk a little bit about the different integrations and extra tools you can pull in to the CRM to append your data, give you extra improvements to your data. And just keep your data really useful and clean.

5:50  
Cleaning up your list of incomplete transactions, managing duplicates, which will be a big topic, and then options for cleaning up your list of accounts. If you do decide that you want to do kind of a bigger clean, like removing old inactive accounts from the database, how to do that, how to do that safely, and how to backup that data in case you decide you do need it down the road. And once we've decluttered and tidied up, we can optionally take some time to clean and sharpen up our tools for using them for the next year. I'm going to run this metaphor as far as I can just to warn you in advance. But I'm for sharpening your tools I'm thinking about when you log into the CRM, making those initial views and the screens that you visit as useful and helpful to you as possible and actionable as possible. So preparing your list of reports, your dashboard, your list pages, and your view of accounts.

6:47  
Based on all those topics, we're gonna send out a quick survey in zoom, we'd really like to hear from you what your priorities are, and what inspired you to join join us today. So that I can focus in on those topics as we go through. So I'm going to launch this survey right now.

7:03  
And we'll give it a couple of minutes to run, I'm going to keep going. But please fill that out as it pops up for you. Thanks.

7:13  
Alright, so while you're thinking about kind of your inspiration and your goals for this, I'll start talking a little bit about overall strategy for a cleaning project.

7:24  
Now it can feel silly to really project manage cleaning up your database. But I do find that it's really helpful if you just take 10 minutes to make a plan, kind of prioritize what you're going to do, and maybe even set a timeline goal for yourself, it can really help in actually getting that project through to completion. So that's my suggestion.

7:43  
Next, gather up all your cleaning supplies, you know, put together your cleaning kit. So can you recruit any help? Do you have interns, volunteers, other staff members who can join in and help help out with part of this? Do you have all the tools you need?

8:01  
Do have Excel or another spreadsheet tool available to you? Do you have the access level that you need to have in CRM? I can point this out when we jump into CRM in a second. But, you know, do you have the right permission level to get everywhere in the system that you need to go if not, you know, talk to your system admin and make sure that you have the access and the tools that you need to be able to do the jobs that you're planning. And then safety first, you know, get your safety goggles if you're doing a really big job. I'll talk about this as we go through some of the specifics. But build it into your plan to know if you're going to make any bulk changes using some of the tools I'll talk about later. Keep a backup of that data. You know, if you're running a report, because you plan to delete those accounts from the system as a cleanup job, export that report, keep it in a file, we can always get it back that way if you have it on file somewhere.

8:55  
Next, block off some time on your calendar for these cleaning projects.

9:00  
I especially find it helpful to think about kind of turning a big job into bite sized pieces, you're merging 100 duplicates in the system could take a couple hours feels really overwhelming. I mean, sometimes you can put on a nice podcast and just go go for a while, which is fine, if that's your style. But also you could do 10 minutes of duplicate management a day for 10 days and get through the same number of duplicates, and that could fit into the rest of your calendar a little bit better.

9:28  
Also, just as an aside, we're talking spring cleaning, because of the time of year but

9:35  
kind of what is spring for your organization might be different, metaphorically, I guess

9:42  
I'd say track what time of year is your downtime. If you do have some, for example, if you're a really summer focused organization, youth summer camps, that kind of thing. That might not be the time to do this project. Maybe fall is better or winter is better. If you're an organization that's really fun.

10:00  
a certain year end giving summer is a great time to clean up your list to get ready for that year and rush that's going to come your way. So just give some thought to where you can fit it into the rest of your fundraising or membership plans for the year.

10:14  
And last advice is, do take your list of potential tasks and find ways to prioritize it. So you don't bite off more cleanup work than you can chew in a single dedicated window of time.

10:27  
In particular, if you're, if you're the person who's in taking requests from the rest of your staff about the database, this could be a good time to set, set aside a little energy to put together some sort of system to manage those requests, even if it's just an Excel spreadsheet. Or you could use the activities tool in CRM, and just, you know, give them a custom status of CRM request, something like that. That way, you'll have that built in log of the requests that have come in, you can really compare them side by side and decide what's what's crucial to do right now, or what's useful to do right now.

11:04  
All right, thank you all so much for filling out the poll. Right now, tips and tricks coming in at the top, I've got some tips, and I've got some tricks, so we're good there. And then managing duplicates. Yes, I will definitely focus a lot of time there. And relationships is also really top. So thank you for all that information to help us. I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll.

11:29  
Awesome.

11:30  
All right. So talking about that question of prioritizing. And just, you know, if you've got a bunch of ideas for what you'd like to clean up in the database, and you want to decide what do I do right now, what do I do? First? Here's some questions to think about.

11:45  
What data do you need in order to accurately communicate with every constituent in your database? If you're trying to do some segmentation of your campaign, email audiences, for example, or your campaign letters for your end appeals? Do you have the data you need? So that you're ready for that?

12:05  
Do you know who you know which membership level everyone is attached to? So that you can cleanly communicate to each of them?

12:12  
How do you need to report on your data? are you reporting back for funders? Any issues with reporting for Finance? Any gaps or problems there?

12:24  
Is the data that you're putting energy into tracking right now useful to you, you know, are you spending time up keeping data fields that no one on your team is actually using for anything, this is a good time to step back and just think about the fields and what you're spending your time on?

12:40  
Do you have a million fields or tags that no one uses anymore? Kind of pairing with that, you know, what is taking up space or time in the database that's not being used and doesn't have potential to be useful in the future? And my last one is, if you went in, and you pulled a mailing report, with everybody in the database right now, would it be ready to run the mail merge? Or would you need to do clean up and extra work? In particular, I am thinking of like the year end, fundraising, membership renewal cycle with that, but you could base it on whatever time of year, you need to do those big mass mailings to your team. And just think about, think ahead to that and what your needs are going to be when you get there.

13:22  
So that's kind of the end of the overall strategy. So let's get into decluttering.

13:29  
Inspired by Marie Kondo does this data, spark joy slash serve our mission?

13:36  
So this is getting a little bit more into the fields that you're using and kind of strategizing for these?

13:45  
Couple more questions to think about if this is one of the areas you're really focusing on for your cleanup? Are you using all of these individual or company types and fields? Are any of them getting out of date so that you don't trust them anymore? Or are they difficult to upkeep for some reason?

14:03  
Are they actually helping you work with your accounts better? Are they? Are they useful to you, even if they have accurate data, they might not be something that you're using for your communications, or you're actually looking at daily. And then this is one where you can really pull in the rest of your team. If you know, I know some of you are one, one person shops, I used to be that person too. But if you have a larger team, you could check in with them and say, you know, are there any data points you don't trust and why? And then is there anything you're not using? That's just taking up space and taking up kind of mental load when you look at it? I'm gonna dive into CRM in just a second, especially for these next few things. So what I'm going to show you is a couple options for decluttering. These individual company lists, custom fields and just your general fields that have lists dropdowns or checkboxes in the system. There's options to delete or inactivate options within those lists and there

15:00  
is also a couple good ways to consolidate if you have duplicates, or you just like to kind of roll up a couple subcategories to a larger category to make it a little simpler.

15:11  
I'm also going to show you our batch update tool when you need to do bigger data cleanup jobs. And then we're gonna get into the relationships in the system. So I'm going to swap over to CRM here.

15:25  
caveat, the little IMT up at the top will be unfamiliar to you, that just indicates this is an internal system, it's my internal system and all the data is fake. So no constituent names or details you'll see today are anybody real.

15:42  
So, first, I want to just point out where to go to find all of your lists and fields, what I find it helpful to do is kind of review them at the top level. So you might just look at each of the list pages, maybe even pull them out and make a little chart for yourself in an Excel document. And that's where you can really do that high level strategy of what's useful. What's missing is anything out of date, what do I want to change, or merge or rearrange. So to take a good high level, look at all your fields, we're going to head straight into global settings.

16:20  
And a couple spots in particular, there are a bunch of different pages in global settings that lead you through to manage various lists and fields in the system. So things like the prefixes list, the genders list, your types, individual and Company, the different types of relationships that can be linked, and other ones that you may or may not be using, like the different types that you can assign to notes, when you add them to accounts. These are all going to be a little more straightforward. So if I click into prefixes, for example, you will just get, essentially the list is will be right here. And then you can add or delete from this page. So this can be a quick way to go in. And for example, this is one I should probably take care of, we've got one version with an ampersand and one without that are really the same thing. So I could go through and make an adjustment for that. I'll show you that with the the batch update in a second.

17:19  
For custom fields heading back to global settings, those have a little more complication to them. Custom fields, the ones that probably almost everyone is using are the All account custom fields. You may also have membership, custom fields, donation, custom fields, we've got event, custom fields, and then the most obscure is your store product information fields. If you're using any of those, the setup process is pretty identical, you'll just want to click in to the section to see what fields you have. And then you can go a layer deeper by clicking edit on any of the fields to review the specific options within the list. For example, with this one, I just set it up as a text field. But with volunteer interests, which is where I meant to click this is where we actually have a drop down or checkbox list. And you can review all the specific options and make sure everything's lining up and is still useful to you. So there are two layers to think about just the field itself. And then the options within the field when it comes to drop down checkbox and radio, custom fields. So that again, can be one that's useful to kind of review in the system, maybe even pull out into its own list so that you can compare all the fields side by side and make sure everything is useful to you.

18:41  
I do want to talk about the Type fields specifically a little bit. So I'm going to jump back over to individual types.

18:51  
These are

18:53  
for those of you who may not be using these yet, these are a little bit of a higher level tag or flag that you can place on accounts to label them in a way that anyone who's accessing the database can quickly see how that person is involved with your organization. It's also a shortcut to then run a report of everyone who is for example, a board member or a staff member, create mailing lists based on these, these lists can get long and unwieldy. So a couple of things to think about. If you come in here and you notice, you know, hundreds of options. It could be a good idea to plan a cleaning project to migrate some of those extra types, especially if they're sort of subcategories of a larger category into their own separate checkbox custom field. For example, if instead of volunteer, you have listed every type of volunteer that works with you, you might want to keep a volunteer type but then have an additional custom field to to determine those subcategories that can just keep your screen cleaner make it easier to enter the data when someone is entering

20:00  
In the new account and prevent errors there, and make it easier to sort through your data in general.

20:07  
A couple of cleanup things, as you're reviewing these lists, there are a couple of options if you decide that there's a

20:16  
listing or one of the labels on the list is not useful to you anymore. Like if I decided, you know, I'm not really tracking press contacts in the CRM anymore, we were doing less PR activities. Now than we used to something like that, you can always delete an option fully. What this will do is remove it from any account that has has that type on it already. So you will potentially lose old data, you can just think through whether that works for you. Or if you still want to have those old accounts that are labeled as press contact. The other way you could go is use the status option.

20:54  
This will prevent you from adding anybody new to that type. It'll simplify the Type list when you're entering a new account in the system, this won't appear anymore, but you keep all of that old data. So if you do look at an account from 510 years ago, it would still have the press contact type.

21:12  
Another option, you may have clocked that I have volunteer and volunteers. Sometimes this can happen especially if you're doing a lot of data importing, maybe I just made a spelling error. It is possible if you start to delete an option,

21:29  
you delete and then hit submit, you start to delete an option that has active that is actively being used on accounts this this field isn't blank, it is populated on exactly one record. So I set this up in advance, you can guess but it is populated on one record, you'll have the option to consolidate, I really wanted to point this out because it is kind of tucked away you have to start the deletion process to see that this is here. But with this, I can say I want to get rid of volunteers. But obviously I want that volunteers person to still be labeled as a volunteer. So I will be able to say substitute another individual type. So migrate this record into the volunteer catalog category, go ahead and continue to delete.

22:18  
And then it will succeed. So that way, I'm not losing that data, I'm just consolidating a few duplicate options into one.

22:29  
Next thing I wanted to talk about is the batch update tool. This is when you have some larger scale adjustments to make.

22:38  
For example, it's not just as simple as consolidating volunteer and volunteers into one. Instead, I want to create an entirely new individual type in the system and label 2000 accounts with that type, something like that.

22:54  
When you have these types of changes coming up, the best option is actually an extra function that you might not have run into before through the import manager tool in the system. So this is useful, obviously for importing and brand new data. But it can also help you with updating large sets of data that are already in the system that you definitely wouldn't want to do manually one by one. And also that you can't do through some of the simpler Bulk Tools like the consolidate or archiving

23:26  
the example I wanted to use here, and let me actually go to an account to show you

23:32  
the mistakes that I've made, which is I duplicated two custom fields, they have the same function in my system. So I've got my data kind of split into two places. What happened was, I didn't realize when I created this interests custom field, that I actually already had a volunteer interest field just titled volunteer project interest, I forgot to look across this too. So what I want to do is consolidate these two into one, I'm actually going to keep the volunteer project interest field and delete the interests custom become the interests custom field, which is extra, but I don't want to lose any data from those two fields.

24:12  
So the best way to perform kind of a larger consolidation when it's across a couple of fields or requires that you kind of have eyeballs on the specifics as you're doing the merge is we call it the batch update, and it's through the import manager. Step one is run a report to pull the accounts that you want to update and make sure you keep the neon account ID in the report. I'm going to just run a quick

24:42  
report of accounts. And actually, that reminds me one big caveat with this batch update option. We don't have a way through the import manager to batch update transaction data. So if you've got a big change, like updating the donation date on

25:00  
On 200 donations or updating the membership expiration date, because you're going to give everybody an extra two months at the end of their membership,

25:10  
those tasks will not be manageable with the import manager, get in touch with us, we have some other options for those types of batch transaction updates, you can send in a support ticket. What what it can do though, with the import manager, or I can, as I keep calling it batch update, which is kind of the hidden extra function of the import manager, we can update account fields. So address name information, custom fields that are at the account level, any of that basic data that needs a big update, this is the way to go.

25:45  
What you want to do is restrict the the report to just the accounts that you're targeting. So I am going to add

25:54  
a criteria to just grab the accounts that have this extra interests field

26:00  
that they have data in this field. So say interests is not blank, they've got something that I populated accidentally in that spare field that I created.

26:11  
And similarly, you'll want to keep the output columns in the report limited down to as few as possible only the items that you want to update. So I'm going to quickly go through and clear out all of the extra default output columns, keep the account ID that part's key.

26:31  
And then include just the fields that you want to target. So I've got the interest field, and then the field that I want to move the data into, which is volunteer project interest.

26:42  
Now I'm going to run and export this report.

26:46  
And this is where it's useful to have Excel or some other spreadsheet tool that can manage this part of the cleanup. The idea with this tool is

26:56  
you need to do a lot of updating fast, and it will be faster to just do it in a spreadsheet and then re import it into the system versus having to click through and manage each individual account. Although I would say normally, if you're like me and you have less than 10 accounts, you could go either way, it might be just as fast to update them quickly in the system. I'm just doing this as an example, if you hit more than 10 or 20 or so that's when this definitely gets into timesaving territory.

27:26  
So we've got the output version of the report here,

27:31  
you'll see that this is the data that was incorrectly put into this extra interest field. You'll notice that for because this is a checkbox field in the system, there's going to be we call it the pipe symbol, well, not we people call it the pipe symbol. And that is the break between multiple options. So if you are creating maybe new list options, and you come into a spreadsheet and say, grants, comma events, make sure you change those commas to the pipe symbol before you import to the system. Otherwise, NEON will think that that's just a single list option grants comma events, and you could create some duplicates or some extra options in there. If you've already got a big spreadsheet with a bunch of commas, don't worry, I would recommend selecting everything. And using the Find and Replace, you can just switch out the comma for the pipe symbol. No worries there.

28:31  
Just another quick tip, too, if you're using this process to actually eliminate options from the list, you're doing a couple different cleanup tasks like maybe I just want to get rid of grants entirely. It is fine to use Find and Replace to just replace grants with a blank.

28:50  
What can be tricky here is you'll see these kinds of hanging extra pipe symbols. And they can worry you like what is neon going to do with these pipe symbols. It will ignore them so you won't get any extra blank options created any problems there. So it is safe to really work in bulk. And you can leave extra pipes. Even if I end up with some kind of mess like this, you're safe, you can still reimport it. I'm going to keep Graham's grants for the purpose of this so

29:19  
so with this one, it's pretty simple. I didn't have data filled in for these under the corrected field that I want to move them to. So I can just copy paste over. You also might have a situation where you have good useful data in both both columns. And for that I'm not going to get too deep into Excel tricks today, but I do recommend

29:41  
trying out the concatenate option. This will let you join a couple of columns together which can be really useful.

29:54  
I do need to add an extra pipe symbol in there.

29:58  
So that's an option too.

30:00  
You obviously in this case, I'm just duplicating the same thing. So I'm not going to run with that. But if you if you have multiple sets of useful data, that's a trick that can help.

30:09  
I'm then going to limit this down as much as possible again. So I really just want to import the volunteer project interest data. And then I'm going to delete the interests field. So I'm going to get rid of my extra columns. A warning here, going back to the safety first that I talked about earlier.

30:27  
Save a copy of your initial spreadsheet in case something goes wrong, you can always import to get back to where you started from. Just useful to have that on file. And secondly, make sure you don't add any extra columns or data fields in the spreadsheet that you map into the system.

30:45  
NEON will take your word on this spreadsheet. So if you have something like phone number added, just leaving it blank, you know, just an extra column that's hanging out for no particular reason. If you import this in neon would, you know taking you at your word,

31:02  
overwrite phone numbers on these accounts with blanks. So make sure you keep it as simple as possible. And also that every piece of data in the spreadsheet is what you want to have in the system.

31:15  
Last step here is take it make sure you've got a useful name and just double check, if you exported it as an Excel file, convert it into a CSV file with your save as before you go to re import it. That's just what the import manager can read.

31:33  
Just gonna call this volunteer field cleanup.

31:39  
So now we've got the spreadsheet, it's all ready, that was a lot faster than doing it individually, well, maybe not with less than 10. But if there was, if there had been 100, that would have been way faster.

31:52  
The last step is to get it back into the system. So you'll want to head back to Tools, import manager

32:00  
and start a new import.

32:06  
It's still good to call it an import. But the trick to getting into kind of that hidden second function of the import manager, the batch updates is actually this first question here. I'm just gonna say volunteer field cleanup for my name.

32:21  
And the trick is to say, yes, my spreadsheet has account IDs. And then yes, those are neon CRM account IDs that I'm using. When that's the case you have, you've eliminated any chance of creating duplicates in your system, because NEON will know exactly who they're dealing with, and will just update the data fields that are already there.

32:44  
Just updating account data, you can also use this tool to add new donations memberships or event registrations to the system. Just a reminder, though, that it's not going to update your existing transactions, it would just be adding new ones if you've collected them from some other system, or you just finished running an event, something like that.

33:04  
Next, I want to grab my file again,

33:07  
volunteer field cleanup, again, double checking it's a CSV. And then these settings will most likely be correct. I do have a header row in my spreadsheet. And then each row has one account. This second question deals more with how you're formatting your addresses if you're updating addresses.

33:26  
Now neons gonna read the spreadsheet and give back a readout of each column in the table, you'll want to make sure to match account ID two account ID, it won't let you continue without that. And then you'll want to match up any additional fields that you're updating to the correct field in the system. So notice that there's going to be a column for standard. And then for custom fields. This is a custom field we're updating. So I'm going to match this up to volunteer project interest.

34:01  
Now it's going to take a second Neon is double checking that all of the ID numbers in my spreadsheet match REAL ID numbers in the system.

34:10  
Success we made it through. And the next thing is going to check is whether the options that are in my spreadsheet, which are events, fundraising grants, actually match up to Options inside the field that I'm trying to put them into in the system. You can create new field options this way, but this is a good spot to be careful because you want to avoid creating duplicates, if possible.

34:35  
I've already got events, I've got fundraising. And for grants, it turns out that my existing interest field actually says grant writing instead of grants so I'm going to match those up since they do they do correspond

34:50  
All right now we're gonna go ahead

34:54  
quickly drink some water and

34:58  
the system is going to ask if I want to save

35:00  
This mapping, if I were doing a bunch of similar updates over time, I would go ahead with it, it'll just save you a few steps, but we don't need it right now.

35:09  
And now it's going to import and use this quick process to go ahead and update the fields that we've updated.

35:17  
Success. So now, I've managed to migrate all of the data from that extra field that I accidentally created into the correct field. The last step would be to go back into global settings and delete the duplicate field that I no longer plan to use. So this will be back to custom fields all accounts.

35:40  
And I can delete this interest field confirming the warning message.

35:46  
I'm gonna get this consolidation question again.

35:51  
But I'm just gonna go ahead and remove I've already, you know, made the changes necessary to make sure this is a safe change to make.

36:02  
Alright, that's it for the batch update tool, and just kind of a simple example for how to use it. So I did want to talk now about relationships in the database a little bit. This can be another one to consider putting on your list for this, this spring cleaning project.

36:19  
And to demonstrate,

36:22  
I'm gonna go to the test account I created for myself in here.

36:28  
Depending on your organization, you may have some combination of households, employment, relationships, and just other relationships you're tracking. You'll know which one is most important for you, depending on on what your priorities are. But you could take a look at any or all of them. So just wanted to start by reviewing the three types of relationships. And you'll see them right here on accounts.

36:52  
If you're on a company account, it will look similar except they won't have households because obviously a company will not be part of a family household. So you'll see all three really in line on individual accounts.

37:06  
Starting with households,

37:09  
what a household is really doing is pulling together a couple of different individual accounts that share an address.

37:17  
The key pieces of data that are unique to the household and not part of each specific individual in the household are if you open up this main household record at the top by clicking Edit,

37:29  
there the household name, household salutation, and then you'll get the option to choose from all of the possible addresses that are on the two accounts to determine which one is the home address that they actually share together.

37:45  
Things to consider when you're looking at your household as a whole.

37:49  
How do you want to use your household name and salutation? Do you have a mixture of formal and less formal salutations and names that have grown in the database over time? You know, maybe you had a switch like a lot of us did from a more formal form of address to more informal over time. And then for household names, do you want to use the full names of people? Or do you want to just use household or you know, block family or the blocks or you know what, what makes sense there. Note that this is a free entry field. So if you are formulating a household name from folks with multiple different last names, you have the space to do that, that might be a good place to do Laura block and Yuki Yuki as my cat, which is a silly example for the database, but we'll just say her last name is the cat. So in that case, you can have that mixed mixture of different names and different forms of address.

38:48  
If you want to take a look at this household data in aggregate to review it all together and you know determine patterns look at how you're currently using it and changes you'd like to make. A good spot to go is accounts households. And this will be a list of all of your households with the household name. So you can take more of a macro view of how you're using these names and then the changes that you want to make from here.

39:14  
The next one is company relationships.

39:19  
This will be between a company or an employer and their employees. So you'll find it in the employment history tab on individual accounts or the company contacts tab is the equivalent on the company account.

39:36  
Couple things check here. You will have the ability within the contact section to manage the person's employment specific information. For example, if they have a particular work email that you want to track here, but you really want to use their personal email for their individual account communications, it is possible to either put them in both places or keep them

40:00  
apparate there'll be space in the employment record for just that employment information.

40:05  
You can also record, start and end dates. So you can have past employment recorded for folks, if you do get an update that someone has moved on to a new company, but it's valuable to you to know that they have those connections that their previous employer, the update you can make is just coming in and filling in and the date. Filling in the end date doesn't require that you have a start date, either, you can use just one or the other.

40:30  
Also, if you don't have a specific end date, but you just want to mark them as a form or contact, the checkbox to change between current and former is not attached to, you know, it's not going to require you to put in a specific end date. So that works as well.

40:48  
The last type of relationships.

40:52  
We just call it relationships or account relationships in the system. This is a good place to track any other types of connections that you want to use in the system. I really wanted to focus on this one a little bit, because I think it's underutilized and people don't necessarily run into it. It's similar to just putting a note on an account, but it has a little bit more power, because it will show up on both accounts. And there are some dedicated reports to pulling these relationships back out of the system.

41:20  
I think it's especially powerful for major donor prospects or kind of your your top top constituents in the system, tracking all of the connections your board members have that could potentially be useful to you, collecting that data and putting it in a place where it really becomes usable in the system. If you're preparing a big mailing campaign, you could pull a list of who people are connected to and have the closest connection on the board or in your volunteer base. Sign the note that you're sending out those kinds of those kinds of useful extra personalization tools can really come into play here.

41:58  
I've just connected myself to my mom in here, as an example. So I could edit that relationship, you'll have relationship roles, and also space for extra notes to give context, if you do have details about that board member relationship.

42:13  
You're not required to use the date fields, but they can be useful if you want to track you know, exactly when were these two people, co workers, you know, how long has it been since they work together or, you know, have they has an adult child moved away from home and now they have a new address at college. But I should still know that they have that relationship.

42:35  
There is a little bit of customization you can do with this final category, the general relationships, you'll notice when you go to create a new relationship. And I'll just start a new one, that you have a specific list of the types of relationships that you're using in your system, pet, classmate, coworker, etc. These may be different for your specific organization, you may have really specific roles that you want to track or specific types of people and their relationships to each other.

43:05  
So another good cleanup tasks that you could consider for your lists this year. In global settings, there is a list page

43:15  
called account relationship types. If I click on it correctly, there we go. Account relationship types is where you can manage these different roles that you're using. So we build in a whole list of individual relationships by default, you'll see a lot of the same ones in your system. Some of these may not be useful to you, maybe roommate is not really relevant to your particular organization. You can inactivate or delete those. And then you can start adding your own custom options to the list as well. That way these lists will really be useful for you and will capture the relationships that you want to track in the system.

43:55  
All right.

43:57  
I think that's everything I have for the Marie Kondo thing of your database. For right now, I'm going to swap back over to my deck for a minute to go into the next step in the process the next couple of things to consider.

44:15  
So tidying up once you've kind of cleaned the decks by decluttering. There's a couple tidying tasks you could do to really brush up your database and get it into great shape. I'm actually going to hand it back to Sam for a little while to talk about different options for appending data and getting extra useful information into your system. And then we'll dig back into the CRM to talk about managing your incomplete transactions, duplicates, and then a couple tricks for removing old or inactive accounts in the system. So, Sam, you want to talk about appending data for a minute? Yeah, excuse me. Absolutely. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about two of our partners here at NEON one, the first being true givers.

45:00  
So if you're unfamiliar with true givers, they're most known for what we call the National change of address address or n COA update. So there's kind of three areas that true givers and a partnership with true givers in conjunction with your neon CRM system would be able to provide your organization. So the first one, making sure that we are appending new addresses. So after basically, the National change of address Services provides new addresses after a constituent relocates. So rather than spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out, you know, perhaps their new address or storing old address information inside of your neon CRM system, the benefit of this service is that your mail list will always be accurate. This will, of course, lead to less waste and a higher ratio of mail getting to the right people. The second one here, true givers is also going to notify your organization about any deceased contacts in a timely manner. So this integration data will actually give your organization the opportunity to be sensitive, intentional, perhaps very mindful, in the weeks and months following someone's passing, making sure that you're not, you know, blasting them with outreach emails and things like that. And then lastly, true givers at its core, of course, is a Nash NCLA platform. But it actually is able to pull in some individual and household demographic information

46:41  
into your neon CRM system as well. So you're able to actually report on that information and even have it trigger workflow automation, this is actually a really great kind of low cost or starter option. If you do not have any type of like, well, screening initiatives in place, it's a, it's a great way to start maybe a major gifts kind of initiative, perhaps then using that revenue to purchase something like windfall. So windfall over here is a well screening service, specifically for nonprofits.

47:19  
That provides things like precise net worth,

47:24  
which is calculated actually on a weekly basis. And then that is then synced into your neon CRM system.

47:31  
And it's going to track also things like consumer financial data, philanthropic donations, property ownership, recent mortgages.

47:41  
And you will, you can actually use that data to build out segmented workflow triggers for per curated communications down the line for building out some of your larger major gifts programs. So we'll send up some follow up information about these two integrated partners at the end of this as well.

48:04  
Thanks, Sam. Yeah.

48:07  
Actually, next, I do want to go back into CRM for a second to show a few more things.

48:14  
So when we get into an of this, tidying up stage, couple topics to consider.

48:22  
One thing to take a look at is probably the best way to find this, although you can run it through reports will be through your main mission control dashboard. So just click the logo to go back to your home base. And find this incomplete transactions widget. It may already be on your dashboard by default, if you're missing it, go into actions add new widget and you can pull it from the widgets menu.

48:47  
This is a useful spot to do a little cleanup on to get it back to zeros across the board. That way, when something does change, and you get a new number there, you'll really clearly know that there's a transaction to take another look at and make sure that you figured it out. There's a couple of reasons this could happen. Pending is typically caused by you. So for whatever reason, you have

49:12  
entered something as pending, meaning maybe the checks in the mail and you're waiting on it, or you issued a partial refund to somebody and that extra amount is still outstanding or owed. Or maybe intentionally somebody just paid a portion of what they intended to pay and you're still waiting on the extra amount. Failed error is typically on their end and most commonly that's a declined credit card or declined ACH transaction for these.

49:42  
What can sometimes happen is the person will they get the fail, failed message and realize oh yeah, I did put in the wrong expiration date. I forgot my card changed. So you may be able to go through to their account and realize that they actually right after that they submitted a corrected transaction and it was come

50:00  
deleted. If they didn't, though, it might be a sign that they could be a recurring donor or auto renewing member whose card failed and they haven't gotten back on board yet. In which case, you could follow up with them or you know, prompt them to update their information. Or they could be somebody who intended to donate came in their transaction failed. And instead of re attempting it or making another, you know, taking another shot at it, they've just kind of they fell away from the process. And they might be somebody to target with a follow up email or some other details like that. This, it can just be a useful spot to see, do I need to do any one, one on one follow up? Or do I need to add them to a particular mailing list, etc. You can also attempt to retry a transaction right from here. So if you get in contact with somebody, and they say, You know what, it failed yesterday, but I, you know, I verified my new card with my, my bank, and I'm good to go now. So go ahead and charge it again, you could always just create a new transaction and ask them to give give you their information a second time. But it is also possible to use the retry option to just give it another shot. And that way, you don't have to collect new information from them over the phone or however you're you're talking to them.

51:18  
In order to get this list back to zero. So kind of marking off items that you've already verified, and you know, you're not going to follow up on

51:26  
best option is to click through, this can be good either way, because it will give you some extra details about the transaction, once you click through, you'll get to the detail page, which can tell you exactly what was going on with that transaction, for example.

51:43  
This is probably because it was a fake credit card that I was using. But you know, it would say there were errors sending data to the payment processor, this was run through neon pay. Here's the cardholder detail for my very fake credit card that I tried to use here. But you may be able to get some extra detail with real legitimate card information, this error message can tell you, you know, they they got this, the CVV code wrong or the zip code didn't match up or any other details, you know, insufficient funds, whatever might be the case, if you're reviewing this, and you know, maybe I've confirmed that Jamie went ahead and resubmitted a correct transaction a minute later, so I don't need to worry about this.

52:25  
I'm just going to click Cancel to move this status to canceled in the system. That will take it out of the widget. And essentially mark that I have followed up and I know what I've done with this. So once you've gone through and marked all of these as canceled, the widget will clear out and be back to zero so that when something pops up there, you'll note a follow up on it.

52:49  
Now duplicates,

52:53  
couple of things to look at when it comes to cleaning up duplicates in your system. And the best place to see all of the options side by side is under Tools, duplicate management.

53:04  
First things first, the account match tool. If you're new to neon within the last couple of years, you already have this turned on. So you'll just see that it already says account match and probably has a number for accounts that have already been merged. If you've been using neon for a few years, you it's possible that you may or may not have turned on this feature yet, I definitely recommend looking into it. If if you don't see this, when you first click into duplicate management, you may want to dig in and consider turning this on, there will be a quick link to turn it on from here. Account match is our automated deduplication tool. The way it works is it's specifically looking at data that's submitted by your constituents through online forums. It also works for anything coming in through the API if you're using some integrations. But the main thing is the online forms. Anyone who submits data through the online form when they already have an account that exists in the system, as long as their name and email match up, will automatically merge the data in together. We do have a support center guide if you want to take a look under the support option to get the the nitty gritty details of how it's how it manages it. But essentially NEON will keep the newest and most up to date information provided by the constituent as the primary information so if they're providing a new address, a new phone number, that kind of detail that will stay as the current information on the account. Everything else will be kept but would just be moved back to be a secondary address or a secondary phone number. The only exception is will keep the original creation date and kind of how that person got started with your organization and will keep their original account ID number so that that that kind of age of the account and detail about the account will be kept

55:00  
We also won't ever overwrite blank data fields, or sorry, we won't ever overwrite data fields with blanks. So if somebody submits a new form, and maybe you've kept the phone number field optional, and they don't fill it in, it's blank, but their old account has a phone number, we're not going to replace that phone number with a blank we will we will keep the phone number that you already have on file. So that can just be reassuring when you're creating your forms. It is okay to keep the requirements light for completion rates, you're not going to lose the valuable data that you've had before.

55:37  
One last tip with this we do have a built in essentially a database within the database of common nicknames that are associated with names and those will still count as a duplicate. So if you've got

55:52  
Robert Smith and Bob Smith submitting you know it's the same guy submitting a couple forms, as long as his email address is still consistent. We'll recognize those as duplicates just variations on the name.

56:06  
Now there's a second category is similar situation, but maybe it's not a perfect match. I've gone back to my cat Yuki again. But let's say

56:17  
Yuki submitted two different forms. And one time she used her correct name, Yuki block. And the other time she used her nickname, which is UK's. Now I feel very silly with my example. But you get the idea. She used the same email, she's still Yuki at the cat.com. UK's and UK is not a common nickname that that Nyan picked up on understandably. So this is going into the partial match queue here. So it is useful to come back to duplicate management to review this tool periodically. And it can be a useful project as part of a data cleanup to come back here and make sure that this list is clear. So you're starting from zero.

57:00  
You'll get details about when the match came in. Today as I was prepping for this webinar, and then why that account ended up in the partial match, in this case, emails a match. But neons a little suspicious of the name and wants to check with you, the user or me in this case, to make sure that these are true duplicates. And it's not just two people using the same email address two cats using the same email address, you'll get similar results if you have matching phone number, but different name, a close match on name but not email, for example, you know a person that has updated and changed their email, but it really is the same person. So for each of those, you can dig in and decide if they are a true match. And then you can either select one at a time or in my case, I have the one example but there will be a checkbox at the top to select the whole list at once. And either mark them is not true duplicates. If you have that information, go ahead and merge them with a click or defer them down to bump them down to the third tool, the duplicate scan, I would just go ahead and complete the merge.

58:10  
Lastly, the duplicate scan. This is your fallback option. You may have spent some time here when you did your initial data import into neon, especially if you were bringing together a couple of different data sources. And then going forward, this will be the place that catches anybody that falls through the previous couple of tools. So if it's somebody that has been entered multiple times into the database, maybe with a matching email, but their surname changed or, or they they've used a couple of different names or their email has changed over time, but it is the same person but you typed them in with the new email. This is the fallback spot.

58:50  
This is also where you can schedule some routine scans. I've already got my my scan scheduled. So I'm going to Unschedule this one. What this will do is let neon know that you want to run this scan on a scheduled basis. So if I want to run for email matches once a week on Mondays book that and then NEON will automatically run it and send me a notification up in the notification panel. If it notices any other duplicates, you'll see some of my past scans here that can give you a call out especially if you're able to get your duplicates lists down to zero. As soon as something pops up. You'll have a notification to go take a look at it.

59:30  
To run these scans, go into actions, run scan.

59:37  
You'll get your results in a quick list here up there. Up ukes is also showing up here since I didn't merge her in the partial queue just yet. But some other options. You know, it looks like maybe Peter, somebody didn't fully get his last name at one point something like that.

59:55  
When you're reviewing these, you can quickly mark them as not being duplicates. Or you can click

1:00:00  
To compare the two accounts, see the details side by side. And with this duplicate scan, it is more time consuming, but it also gives you really direct control over the data that you're keeping. I'll just run through a quick example with Peter,

1:00:16  
I'm going to determine which of these accounts will stay as the main account in the system first, I usually err on the side of the older account. In this case, it's only off by a month. So it's not the biggest deal. But you could keep keep the one that has the oldest date. That will also give you the original ID number. Another way to determine it, though, might be if one has a correct address an accurate up to date address versus an older one,

1:00:46  
you do have the opportunity to keep all of the data. But this will determine which ID number you keep of the two. So with this choice, account number one is going to merge into account number two. Now you might be saying it looks like the last name on the left is the right one. No problem there because in a step after this, we will be able to determine which of the names to keep.

1:01:10  
Step two. And I wanted to point this out, because it's a little bit tucked away, you get the option of whether to merge the account fully. Or

1:01:20  
you might find that maybe for whatever reason, one of them is Peter Sr, and one is Peter Jr. And they're actually members of the same household. So this tool can be used as a shortcut to get people into the same household together, what I usually do is, before I run any of the other duplicate scans, I run the address, match, duplicate scan, that's the one that will clue you in when you know, people are sharing the same address but have different names. Those are ones you could target to check whether they should be linked by household rather than actually merged.

1:01:54  
If you are merging, go ahead with that.

1:01:58  
And then this is that screen that I hinted at where we'd have we'd have the chance to say which account has the correct data that I want to keep. The only fields to worry about are the ones that are listed here, which can only have one true value added to them, you've got to choose one first name, you can't keep both necessarily, although you will still have the preferred name, if they have a nickname that you want to keep all the other data transactions, relationship links, activities, notes, communications history, we keep all of it and just merge all of it into the final account. So those records are safe.

1:02:37  
So I'll say I do want to keep the longer last name.

1:02:40  
And you'll get a final confirmation because we we will double check with you. And then you can go ahead and complete the merge.

1:02:52  
All right.

1:02:54  
Those are my quick, quick tips for the duplicates tool. Thank you all I know I'm running over. This is a big topic as you can see. So I appreciate everyone if you have to go of course, we'll send out the recording afterwards. I will quickly wrap up here though, I did want to talk very briefly about cleaning up the account lists in your system.

1:03:17  
This can particularly come into play if you are maybe you're looking at accounts accounts, seeing the total number of accounts in your system and thinking we have a much larger list than the people who we actually consider to be our active constituents who are really, we're really working with them closely. They're receiving emails, they're answering communications, they're filling out forms that kind of thing. This is probably the quickest spot to go in and see your account number, just a reminder that the account IDs, the highest ID in the system does not correspond to the number of accounts in your system, because we'll never repeat an ID number. So any duplicate cleanup or if you're like me, and you do a million imports and deletions, my ID number is ridiculously high compared with my actual number of accounts. So this is the spot to check or you can run reports to see how many accounts you're dealing with.

1:04:12  
The best way to do kind of a bulk deletion of accounts in the system is another tool that's built into your global settings. And specifically, you'll find it in the left hand column under bulk operations, bulk edit or delete. I'm specifically talking about the deletion here. This can also be useful if you're updating the same field the exact same way on a bunch of accounts at once. For example, I had a client in Los Angeles and we had a just an ongoing problem of people just putting in LA in the City field of course. So this bulk edit was really useful to occasionally go in find every account that had la as the city and just bulk up

1:05:00  
Data to Los Angeles. So it would be a good address to use, deletion is the same. So the way this tool works is it will open immediately into a report in the system. And this is where you want to zero in on those accounts that you consider inactive in the database. This definition is different for everybody. So it is something to really think through and review carefully, what I find is usually some combination of the created date on the account because I don't want to get rid of anybody who hasn't, hasn't, you know, got any transactions or notes recently, but it's because they're brand new, and they're a prospect. So I might say account create a date has to be before so less than

1:05:47  
January of 2017. Or however far back you'd like to go, I usually find

1:05:54  
at least two years, maybe five years depending on the cycle of when you typically see people start to get more involved with your organization. And then you'll also want to make sure you've got something related to having any transactions in the database. This is one where you could just go with

1:06:13  
that they've never made a payment of any kind. Or you could set a cutoff date.

1:06:19  
do consult your finance your finance folks or your accountant to make sure that you're keeping all the records you should be keeping for reporting reasons. But you might be able to look at something like you know, their their most recent transaction date is more than five years ago, or they don't have any transactions in the last three years, something like that. I like to go with transactions because it will cover all categories that when we say transaction that includes donations, membership payments, Event registrations and store purchases if you're using the store module, so it will cover all your bases just in case they've made some other type of payment other than your primary type in the system, which might be donation or membership depending on your work.

1:07:07  
From there, you could go a little deeper if you know that you've got people in the system who are just purely volunteers, for example, you might want to say, actually, for this, you could use either put it in the main search group or exclude from and say, I also I want to make sure I'm not including in the list to delete anyone whose individual type is volunteer, because they might not have transactions. And they might be pretty old in the system, just in the system, they may be old themselves, but specifically in the CRM. But if they're labeled as a volunteer, I want to keep them so exclude from can also be helpful.

1:07:46  
In the interest of time, I'm going to stop going through the Bulk Delete in detail here. But we do have a good support guide that will walk you through step by step, the good things to know are, there'll be an opportunity where you get this report results, I recommend export again, at that point, that's a good time to get those accounts into an Excel document. If something doesn't work the way you expect, you can always re import them afterwards. And also you'll have a backup of all of their data include all of the output columns that you can in that exported report.

1:08:19  
Next thing to know is we will warn you many many times before we let you delete something. So there will be multiple steps after this where you can review the list in detail. Make sure everyone you've included is who you want to include. You're not including anyone you want to keep. And then you'll confirm multiple times. So there are safeguards here.

1:08:39  
Also, when it comes to bulk deletion, I should mention that there's kind of a general safeguard at NEON that we can help you with if something goes wrong with a big data update you're working on, contact us, we do have the ability to roll back your database, kind of send it back in time for up to 30 days prior to when you've contacted us. So 30 day period at any point,

1:09:03  
there are a couple options, we can actually just take your real database and time travel it back to before the thing happened. Or if other new things happened on the same day if someone else was working in the database and did a big import, and they really don't want to redo it, which I understand. We can also take that time traveled version of your database, put it into a separate database. And that way you can get to that data, re import it, review it, review it side by side and just recover anything that goes wrong. Obviously that's a worst case scenario, but just to know that there are safeguards for that.

1:09:41  
All right, thank you again for letting me run over time. The last item that I wanted to mention is just a couple of potential things to consider as you're putting together your plan for cleanup project. I'm calling this clean and sharpen your tools. These are a few things you can tidy up

1:10:00  
Ben and take a look at in the system just to make your day to day use of the system a little bit better. Review your list of saved reports and get rid of super old reports that you aren't using anymore.

1:10:13  
Take a look at the widgets on your main dashboard. See if there's other ones that might be more useful. Limited down, don't overwhelm with you know, a zillion widgets just get the ones that are key and useful and drag and drop them around the screen to put the useful ones right at the top. You also might want to update your admin message in the system. Even if all you do is put a cute cat, GIF or GIF, depending on what you prefer, like I did, or in my example, maybe some useful notes for for your folks. So that's the admin message right here to edit this,

1:10:50  
click on the the gear button, which will show up when you mouse over the widget and then edit message.

1:10:58  
And while I'm here, to clean up your saved reports, go to the widget. And then there'll be an delete option next to reports from here. And you can click through and check them before you do that.

1:11:10  
Last couple of tips, you might want to check out your different list pages in the system. So things like the Accounts page, the memberships page, or the donations page, there's the option to apply filters and then save those filters. So if what's most useful for you is just seeing the new members who joined in the last 10 days, set that up, save your filters, and then you'll save yourself a click every time you come to that page. Similar with account pages, if you you're sick of looking at the fax field, you never want to see a fax number ever again,

1:11:46  
you can click the Configure option there and hide that field, you're not deleting any data, you're just making the view of that page more convenient for yourself. If you use email forwarding, this is a good time to grab the BCC and forwarding email addresses from global settings and save them as contacts in your email program. And then my last one if if you haven't done it recently, take a look at your navigation bar and make sure that the things you use every day are up there, it seems silly, but clicking View More and then choosing your option. If you go to activities every day.

1:12:25  
It'll it'll end up adding up to more time than you might think. So it's worthwhile to go in, use the pencil icon and bump that moves management section up to the top.

1:12:36  
And then just hit save.

1:12:39  
All right, again, thank you for letting me run over. I know I rushed through those last couple of tips, but we will send some follow up resources in particular. Thank you, Sam. Sam has compiled some great resources about some of the tools we mentioned. And then a couple other webinars that are relevant to what we talked about today or could be a good follow up to check out.

1:12:59  
And thanks again to the folks who from from my team who helped out with q&a. Aiden, Hannah. David, thanks so much.

1:13:08  
If we got behind on q&a, or didn't get a chance to answer any questions, we will stay on for a couple more minutes to catch up. And for anyone we don't answer right away, we will follow up with email in the next couple of days. So thank you again, everyone. We'll get the recording up live. And, Sam, did you want to add anything else to wrap up? Um, yeah, number one. Thank you. Thank you, Laura, for all of the in depth kind of walkthrough today. It sounds like this was really helpful for folks.

1:13:37  
There might be if you can check to see if there's another poll.

1:13:43  
We I just had some questions, or we both had some questions surrounding and thank you, Kelly. I think that was you in the chat who mentioned Yeah, some future webinars.

1:13:54  
So we'd love to hear from from all of you. Just other areas of interest, put me on CRM product specific in terms of of what types of webinars we should focus on in the future, what would be helpful. These are just some some pretty larger categories. But if you have if there's other areas, please feel free to type those into the chat as well. We always like to look into those as well.

1:14:24  
Thanks, Sam. Thank you, everyone. Well, we'll be on for another minute to catch up on q&a and let that poll run. Thank you again. And yeah, you know, send in a support ticket, join other webinars, let us know if we can help with other things. And again, we'll get this slide deck and the recording out by tomorrow. Thanks. Have a great day. Thanks, everyone.

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