TLT Customer Resource Management Tool

From ETS

Contents 1 Overview 2 Accessing HighRise 3 When HighRise Should Be Used 4 Standardized Fields for Contacts 5 Batch Uploads 5.1 Create a well-formatted list 5.2 Eliminate the creation of duplicate entries 5.3 Creating the batch upload file 5.4 Organizing the new entries 6 Cases 7 AND and OR Operations 7.1 AND: Selecting a subset of people who have two or more specific tags 7.2 OR: Selecting people who have at least one of several specific tags

Overview

ETS is using HighRise to keep a record of the faculty, staff, and students that we have been working with. This page describes some of the rules and procedures that are needed to ensure quality information in HighRise (naming conventions, use of tags, campus names, etc...).

Accessing HighRise

• Our instance of HighRise is located at http://tltcrm.highrisehq.com
• Cole is the admin on that site and will assign userids and passwords

When HighRise Should Be Used

Add a contact to Highrise or update an existing contact under these conditions:

• When we are working with someone to help plan and execute a project
• When we have an event and want to keep a record of attendees and presenters

New contacts are not needed when we are working with end-users (e.g. the 4000+ people who have blogs at Penn State).

Standardized Fields for Contacts

When adding new contacts or updating existing contacts, keep the following "rules" in mind:

• With first names, use the full formal name (e.g. "David" instead of "Dave") unless the contact prefers the shortened version or a nickname. If you use a shortened version, add a note to their entry stating that they prefer to go by the nickname or short name.
• When entering an e-mail address, use userid@psu.edu instead of a nickname. For example, asg102@psu.edu instead of allan@psu.edu
• Use the Company field for:
  • The person's campus if they work for Penn State (e.g. Penn State Hazleton). Do not use a comma in campus names because it can mess up formatting of CSV files.
  • The person's company, university, or organization if they are outside of Penn State (e.g. University of Michigan, Apple, etc...)
• Use tags to specify the project or event that the person is involved with.
• Use the same tags that are specified for an event, such as tltsymposium2009, LDSC08, DCTG08

Batch Uploads

Batch uploads are very useful if you have something like a mailing list or registration list and you would like to add everyone to the CRM tool. However, use caution because the batch upload process creates duplicate entries for anyone who is already in the system. For this reason, we have come up with the following workflow that should minimize duplicate entries.

Create a well-formatted list

• Start with a spreadsheet of all of the people you would like to enter
  • The fields should include (at a minimum) first name, last name, and e-mail address. The e-mail address should be userid@psu.edu, not an alias. For example, use asg102@psu.edu instead of allan@psu.edu
  • Eliminate as much "junk" as possible: extra characters, spaces, etc...
  • Standardize the information. For example, campus name should be "Penn State University Park", not "PSU UPark"

Eliminate the creation of duplicate entries

• Work with a second person before any new entries are made to check to see whether each person on the list is already in the CRM
  • If they are, add the tag to their existing entry and delete them from the spreadsheet
  • If they are not in the CRM, leave them in the spreadsheet to be a part of the batch upload
• Once the spreadsheet only contains new entries, save it as a Comma Separated Value file (.csv)

Creating the batch upload file

• Before creating the batch upload file, make sure you have followed the above steps. Your data needs to be in a standard format and you should take the time to make sure that the people you are adding are not already in the system.
• Before uploading the file into HighRise, it needs to be in vCard format. Create this format by:
  • Open the CSV file in a text editor such as BBedit or MS Word. Copy the contents.
  • Paste the text into the conversion tool at this web site: http://homepage.mac.com/phrogz/CSV2vCard_v2.html
  • In "Step 2", assign fields to each of the columns in the file using the pull-down menus. For example, assign the first name column to "First Name" and assign the campus name to "Company".
  • In Step 3, copy the vCard information and paste it into a text editor.
  • Save this file with the extension ".vcf" (vCard file) Asg102 15:02, 17 October 2008 (EDT) Do we want to save these vCard files on Athena for future reference?
  • Go into HighRise
  • Click on "Contacts" and then "Import"
  • Click "Upload a vCard file"
  • Select the vCard file that you just created and click "Upload and import"
    • Note, if the file contains more than 100 entries, HighRise will queue the import and send you an e-mail when it is finished importing the records

Organizing the new entries

• Now tag the recently imported new contacts
  • Click on Contacts
  • Under "Show:", select "Recently IMPORTED contacts"
  • Click the checkbox by one of the names. This should enable the display of the "select all" option
  • Click select all
  • Deselect all campus or company name so they are not tagged
  • Click "add tags"
  • Type in the project or event tag
  • Click "add this tag" and that should add the tag to all of the selected entries

Cases

Cases are ways to provide information about non-person things (like events and projects). However, there is no way to batch-add people to cases and people are going to get confused as to when they should use tags and when they should use cases. For now, we recommend that we don't use cases. This information may be better off going into the wiki anyway.

AND and OR Operations

AND: Selecting a subset of people who have two or more specific tags

If you search through one tag, you'll see the tag cloud on the right and it says "Multiple Tags". Click that and then click additional tags to perform an "AND" (i.e. only show people who have both tags). You can keep adding more tag limits to this search/filtering process.

OR: Selecting people who have at least one of several specific tags

Doing an "OR" is a bit more manual. If you wanted people who attended the tltsymposium in 2007 or 2008 (or both), then you select tltsymposium2007 attendees and add a temporary tag like "symposium0708", then start over and select all of the 2008 attendees and tag them with "symposium0708". Finally, select the symposium0708 tag and you have your combined list. After doing whatever you need to do with that list, you can delete the temporary tag if it isn't useful for other purposes.