Explore the Contact Report Framework and Workflow
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the key contact report data model objects and describe the relationships between them.
- Describe the workflow for creating and using contact reports.
Capture Every Learner’s Story
In the last unit, you discovered how contact reports connect people, process, and purpose. Now, it’s time to dig deeper into what makes up a contact report and how staff use them across advancement processes. After all, a single record becomes much more meaningful when it combines all the necessary information and fits within a consistent workflow.
In this unit, you explore the objects included in the contact report framework, and become familiar with the process for capturing alumni interactions consistently and thoroughly.
Contact Report Framework
Behind every contact report is a storytelling framework that’s built for strengthening institutional relationships.
Three primary objects make up a contact report: interaction, interaction summary, and interaction attendee.
Together, these objects help you capture context, participants, and outcomes. Let’s learn more about them!
Interaction
An interaction represents an engagement or event, such as a meeting, phone call, or virtual discussion. Interactions capture who attended, where it occurred, and how it connects to an account or opportunity. For advancement teams, this ensures that every donor or prospect meeting is recorded as a verifiable event that can later be summarized, shared, and analyzed across teams. Think of interactions as a container for all the data surrounding an individual conversation. A single interaction can connect to multiple interaction summaries and attendees.
Interaction Summary
Each interaction includes one or more interaction summaries, which hold conversational data within a contact report. These summaries provide a written account of what happened during the interaction, including the purpose, discussion notes, and next steps.
Here are the key fields included in an interaction summary.
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Purpose: The specific reason for the meeting, such as discovery, cultivation, or solicitation
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Narrative Summary: A written account of the topics discussed and the insights gained
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Next Steps: Concrete follow-up actions to drive coordinated relationship management
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Participants: Complete list of attendees, including donors, family members, professional advisors, and institutional representatives
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Confidentiality: Settings, such as Public, Restricted, or Confidential, for controlling visibility to protect sensitive learner data
Interaction Attendee
Each person involved in the engagement is listed as an interaction attendee on the interaction record. By capturing the complete network of participants, advancement teams can target their efforts more effectively across all key decision-makers.
You can also associate organizations and households with the interaction through interaction-related account or interaction summary discussed account records. This connection is especially helpful for complex or multiparty relationships such as family foundations or corporate donors.
Depending on their context, your contact reports can also relate to multiple other records, including accounts, contacts, opportunities, campaigns, or gifts.
This framework ensures that relationship data is consistent, reportable, and scaleable, and every interaction contributes to a broader picture of engagement.
Now that you understand the contact report objects, let’s turn to the workflow for using them. Along the way, you follow Delaney as she engages with a former Astro U student.
The Contact Report Workflow
Contact reports aren’t just about logging activity. They’re about creating a shared understanding by capturing the nuance of conversation, aligning teams around what happens next, and ensuring continuity over time. When this process is implemented across departments, it transforms interactions into a coordinated narrative that strengthens strategy, stewardship, and donor trust.
With that in mind, let’s focus on the steps for using contact reports: planning the interaction, recording the engagement, sharing and collaboration, follow-up and action, and insight and analysis.
Read on to learn more details about each workflow step.
Plan Interactions
Before any meeting, advancement staff establish the context needed to understand the alumni and guide the discussion. They review past interaction summaries, philanthropic research, and any recent opportunities, campaigns, assessments, or planned gifts associated with the alum. They also identify participants and any supporting roles that were present in past interactions, such as relationship officers, deans, family members, or financial advisors. This preparation ensures that every meeting builds on prior conversations and reflects the donor’s current interests and motivations.
Delaney sees that she has an upcoming call with Sophia, a former student of Astro U. Delaney reads through past contact reports and research to get a better understanding of Sophia, her giving history, motivations, current employment, and other details.
Record Engagement
Then, it’s time to interact. The attending staff members create an interaction record to capture the event details, such as the date, format, and location. As the meeting begins and the conversation unfolds, they create and complete interaction summaries. They fill in the Purpose, Narrative, Summary fields you learned about earlier, and set a Confidentiality Type to ensure proper access and data protection. Finally, they add the interaction attendees to track the meeting participants, and they submit the report.
Before the meeting with Sophia, Delaney creates a contact report to record the details of their chat. As the call begins, Sophia starts by saying how thankful she is for the quality of care that the university medical center recently provided to her father. Later in the emotional conversation, she expresses interest in making a future financial gift to show her gratitude and assist families who face similar circumstances.
In the contact report, Delaney captures the purpose and tone of the interaction, the attendees, and a summary of Sophia’s reflections about her father’s experience and philanthropic interests.
Because the discussion includes sensitive information, Delaney sets the confidentiality of the report to Restricted to ensure only authorized users can view it.
Share and Collaborate
After the meeting ends, staff share the contact report with prospect researchers and other colleagues who work in planned giving and donor relations. By using Manage Participants and Compliant Data Sharing settings, they can set record visibility according to institutional policy. Public reports are accessible across advancement users, while Restricted or Confidential reports are limited to approved users, ensuring compliance without limiting collaboration. Researchers then enrich the contact report by verifying insights or updating donor information.
Agentforce Education includes a robust set of philanthropic research tools, including comprehensive profiles for capturing key life events and financial signals, and an AI research assistant to help researchers quickly surface important donor information. To learn more, visit the Philanthropic Research in Education article in Salesforce Help.
Delaney shares the contact report with the Astro U prospect research team, who provide additional insights into Sophia’s prior engagement and connections for future philanthropic opportunities.
Follow Up and Action
After the institution completes the necessary research and identifies next steps, the advancement staff member creates follow-up activities: Send a proposal, schedule the next meeting, coordinate a stewardship touchpoint, or draft agreements. These actions connect operational tasks with the strategic context captured in the context report. As they further engage the alum, staff create additional interaction summaries to capture meeting details and the next steps needed to move the relationship forward.
A few months after Delaney and Sophia’s discussion, the Astro U medical center launches a campaign focused on patient assistance programs. Delaney revisits the contact report and is reminded of Sophia’s overwhelming gratitude and desire to help healthcare patients. During a follow-up phone call, she uses the contact report information and research findings to guide the conversation and connect with the alum on a personal level.
As a result, Sophia makes a generous donation to the campaign and expresses interest in future gifts to Astro U. Going forward, Delaney works with the advancement team, stakeholders, and financial planners to develop long-term gift concepts, which she then presents to Sophia. Contact reports help Delaney capture each conversation along this journey to record the history of the successful partnership.
Insight and Analysis
Advancement teams can regularly analyze reports and dashboards to identify important trends, such as shared donor interests, campaign themes, and moments that lead to significant commitments. They can also view attendee data to discover recurring patterns: which officers collaborate most effectively, which family members are engaged across generations, or which internal stakeholders help drive major gifts.
In this unit, you discovered the contact report framework, which includes dedicated objects for capturing vital discussions to enhance your alumni relations. You also explored the process for creating and using contact reports, sharing them for collaboration, and applying report information to strengthen future strategy.
Now that you’ve learned the data and process behind contact reports, you’re ready to dive into using them. In the next unit, you take on the role of an advancement officer and create a contact report to capture a conversation with a learner.