How to create a Contact and add information about them
In Sumac, a contact could be a person, organization, business, or even a family. A contact's record stores core information about who they are and their relationship with your organization.
Creating a new Contact record
To add a new contact click Contacts in the main Sumac console window, then click New. That opens a window where you can enter some basic information about the new contact.
Specify whether you are adding a new individual or an organization to your database.
- Notice that the fields change depending on whether you are adding an individual or organization.
- The names of mandatory fields appear in green.
If appropriate, enter the new contact’s Organization, Phone number, and Email address. You can specify whether the email or phone number is for the contact's residence or business.
Potential duplicate records display at the bottom of the screen and if the last name matches exactly, it will appear in red.
- If you added an email address for the new contact, Sumac searches the entire database looking for contacts with the same email address and tells you how many contacts have the same one.
- Click Add to ignore the duplicate email addresses add the new contact.
- Click Review to see the contacts with the same email address. Double-click each Contact to review their record.
Communication records - your interactions with Contacts
Communication records let you record interactions with your contacts. Sumac can automatically create communication records when you generate mailing labels, send emails, and do mail merge operations, but if you want to manually create communication records, there are two main ways.
Add To Contact
Select the contact with whom the communication occurred. Selecting a single contact activates the Add to Contact button. This button allows you to add new records of any type, connecting them to the selected contact.
In the Choose Record Type window, select the type of record you want to add to the Contact. In this example, we'll add a communication record.
Click the Favourites button (bottom left) of the Choose Record Type window to select the types of records you will most frequently add this way.
Notice that Sumac automatically filled in the contact's name and the current date. Now select the communication type. These three fields are required for every communication record.
Additional fields and information you can include:
- associate the communication record with a campaign to make it easier for you to compare which contacts received solicitation letters, and which contacts made donations as a result
- the notes field allows you to summarize what was shared with the contact
- attach a file
- check the sensitive checkbox to ensure only users with permission to view sensitive information can view the communication
Click OK to save the communication record.
Manually create records from each area of Sumac
You can manually add a donation by expanding Fundraising, selecting Donations, and clicking New, or add a reminder by expanding Time & Scheduling, selecting Reminders and clicking New. In this example, we'll create a communication record by clicking Communications.
Next, click the person icon to search for the person with whom you have communicated and wish to record the interaction. Select the contact and click OK.
Sumac fills in the contact and the date. Now you need to select the Communication type, which is the third mandatory field for a communication record. Now you can fill in any of the additional information as outlined above.
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