Our upper management would like to hear if other organizations are creating multiple custom fields on the contact object to identify the various ways the organization thinks of the contact and how the contact interacts with the organization (using flows to automatically assign the relevant value based on actual activity), or if you take the approach not to duplicate data that can be easily viewed and filtered in related lists (through Opportunities, Affiliations, Campaigns, etc.) and reported on, only creating custom fields for data that would be difficult to gather into a single report. For example, which of the following would be your approach? If you take the custom field approach, how do you limit your custom fields? How do you limit which data that is captured elsewhere and is viewable in a related list or easily reported on is also documented in custom fields?
*We are using an Account record type of Internal Group to collocate contacts who serve a function with the organization or belong to some group we defined to think of or work with them in a certain way. We have dozens of such groups.
I'm going to definitely agree. If understanding about applications, enrollment, program engagement, etc had been around 15 years ago, I would not have created a lot of what I did. Manually entered contact information should be info that doesn't change or when it does, the old data is useless (such as an old address or an old email... not entirely useless but not that helpful, either). Data that represents something that changes or something that is renewed should be in a subsidiary record (entrollment, application, etc). And data about a transaction (donation, volunteer event, in-kind donation, program delivery) should be captured, connected and help drive automatic fields that characterize and budket contacts. You can swap ownership around, limit or open up visiblity and all sorts of thigns to help users (none of which I do yet), but work on capturing thye transactional, connect it ot the contacts, and help the data "speak" on it's own for operations, reporting, and planning.
--Terry
