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Contacts with people who aren't clients

As described in the first section, Charitylog is often looked on as a client-centred piece of software, but you can also set up projects to record contacts with people who are not clients. Common uses might be;

• a Volunteer Management project (recording contacts with Volunteers as well as Clients). The volunteer manager could use this project to record all his/her dealings with volunteers and people who want to volunteer. They can use it to track the progress of volunteers' CRB applications, qualifications, courses and supervision meetings. The project could also be used to log contacts and time spent dealing with volunteers at the front desk. In this way, your organisation can count the time and resources spent on dealing with volunteers - it's easy to miss this sort of thing off the normal statistics funders ask for.
• a Marketing project (recording contacts with Organisations and Professionals). If your organisation employs someone whose job it is to promote the work of your organisation, the chances are that they spend a lot of time talking to other organisations, attending events for promotional reasons and so on. By using Charitylog to record this time, it can be included in reports and also assessed for effectiveness.

To record contacts with people who aren't clients, your Administrators will need to first make the Project available to that kind of person on your Charitylog system. When you click the "Record a Contact" button from a Client Details screen, you will probably see a screen that looks like this:

This shows all the Projects for which you can record contacts with Clients - quite a few. If you click a "Record a Contact" button on a Volunteer Details screen, though, you might see something like this:

This shows that there are only three Projects on the system that are available to record contacts with Volunteers. If you get an error message like this:

This means that there aren't any Projects on your system that are set up to record contacts with the kind of person you're trying to work with.

Sometimes you might have Projects that are set up on the system specifically for dealing with a particular type of Organisation or Person, and sometimes it will be appropriate to have Projects that are available to many different types of Organisation/Person. It really depends on your organisation and how your administrators have set up your system. If you think you need to record contacts with somebody and can't, talk to your administrators and ask them to make the relevant changes.

Once you have selected the Organisation or Person you want to record the contact with, and then chosen the Project, the process is basically the same as for recording contacts with Clients. There are a few things to be aware of, however;

• Activity is recorded with the person, regardless of what type of person they are. For example; if I have a person on the system who is both a Client and a Volunteer, and I record a contact with them in the Volunteer Management project, this contact will still show up on their Client Details page, on the History tab. For this reason your administrators may want you to use Project Subcategories to categorise this sort of work done - it's worth checking.
• Using a system called Group Access, your administrators can give different rights to different user groups, and one thing which can be controlled is the ability to record contacts with different types of people. If you don't think you have all the access rights you need - or you think something should be working and it isn't! - the reason may be that your user group doesn't have the necessary permissions. Talk to your administrators about this.