Active Field
Organisations and People within Charitylog have an "Active" field on their records, as shown.
This field often causes confusion among users, so it's a good idea to go over what the concept of being Active (or not) really means within Charitylog. The most common problem is that end users think that they have to make someone inactive when they've finished working with them, so that reports can be created about "how many people are active". This is because users often come from a system where the only way to report on people receiving services is a field like this.
However, Charitylog's reporting features allow you to report on plenty of numbers without having to resort to counting how many people are active. For example, there are reports on...
- Which clients accessed a service in a given time period
- How many contacts there were in a given project
- How many people had open referrals in a quarter
...all without needing to do any reporting on whether people are "Active" or not. The "Active" field in Charitylog is actually one of the most fundamental ways of "removing" someone from the system. Users should only ever make a client inactive if they know that it is appropriate to do so.
Contents
What is the Active field?
If an organisation/person has the "Active" field on their record set to "No", then that organisation/person will be made unavailable to the system. They can be made available (active) again, but it will be more difficult for users to find them. Among other things, the following will happen;
- They will no longer appear in any search results for any organisation/person type.
- They will no longer be available for linking to any other organisation/person on the system - whether that be through Relationships, Volunteer assignments, Support Worker activity, Handyperson jobs, or anything else.
Why making orgs/people inactive should be avoided
When an organisation or person is made inactive, it applies to them across the whole system, no matter how many Types they have. If a Client is also a Volunteer, and a user makes them inactive from the Client Details screen, the client will also stop appearing in searches for Volunteers, which may impact on other users.
Furthermore, if a user makes a client inactive inappropriately, it may impact other users too. For example, when a client ends involvement with one project in an organisation, the users that work for that project should not make the client inactive, because they may be engaging with other Projects too. Making the client inactive will stop them appearing in search results done by any user on the system.
Finally, if a client is made inactive, because they will not appear in future searches, a different user may create a duplicate record for that client in future.
Why all this arises in the first place
Charitylog does not store details of people "under" projects. Instead, there is a pool of organisations and people who are available to anyone who uses that Charitylog system. The orgs/people can engage with one or more Projects, which happens when an Action is recorded. At this point the client is linked to the Project, but is not moved into the Project as such.
The most common cause of errors with the "Active" field is that users see it and assume that it only refers to their Project. In fact, it is something which affects the whole system, because it is an attribute of the org/person themselves, irrespective of whether they are linked to any Projects - and making someone "not Active" will cause them to disappear from all users.
What about reports?
When people are made inactive, their linked data still displays in reports. However, the filters for some reports appear with the option to include/exclude inactive people, and this box is usually defaulted to "exclude" - so making people inactive may remove them from reports that users are running without them realising.
When it is appropriate to make someone inactive
A person should only be made inactive if:
- you know that they are never going to re-engage with your organisation
- OR they are not going to engage for a period of time, and you want to take them out of system functionality.
Scenario 1 might occur when a client moves abroad, so you know they are not going to re-engage. However, even then they should only be made inactive if it is certain they will never engage with any part of the system ever again and you will never need their details. Scenario 1 could also apply to a staff member who leaves the organisation; you no longer want them to appear as available to have work assigned to them, so you would make them inactive. Scenario 2 might apply to a staff member who is going on maternity leave. You could make them inactive for the time that they are away, and then make them active again when they return.
If in any doubt, leave people Active. If you'd like to discuss a particular scenario with us, please feel free to give our customer support department a call.
Rob Kay - manual author (talk) 13:34, 9 December 2014 (GMT)
