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You can use Salesforce.com as a system for reminding you to contact major donors who you haven’t talked to in a certain period of time. Salesforce.com knows how long it’s been since you talked to your major donors if you record the emails and meetings you have with them as Activities in Salesforce.com. You can do this by creating activities by hand, or by using the Outlook integration Salesforce has built. The app then automatically records the “Last Activity Date”. You can see it by modifying the View on the Contacts tab–just add the Last Activity field.

You an look at the last activity date to see when you last talked to someone, but then you have to do the mental math to figure out if that date is far enough out to warrant another contact. Turns out it’s easy to do this automatically.

I created a field called “Days Since Last Activity” which is a formula field that calculates the days from last activity. It looks like this:

IF(NOT(ISNULL({!LastActivityDate})),TODAY() - {!LastActivityDate},NOW()- {!CreatedDate} )

I don’t show it on the page layout for Contacts (you can put it there if you want), but it’s available for filtering in Views and Reports.

Sample use: to see everyone you haven’t talked to in over 60 days, filter for Days Since Last Activity > 60. Here’s a shot of the same view but filtered for people I haven’t talked to in 60 days:

You now have a tickler of people you need to contact that is automatically generated based on the last time you contacted them. Pretty helpful for making sure you’re keeping your key Contacts connected to the organization.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:47 am and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.