Activities Overview 💜

Activities help your organization keep track of donor interactions, follow-up work, fundraising efforts, and other engagement with your contacts.

An Activity can represent something that has already happened, such as a completed phone call or donor meeting, or something that still needs to be completed, such as a follow-up task or fundraising ask. Activities connect to the related contact and can also be assigned to a team member, associated with a Campaign or Appeal, and tracked through DonorDock's boards and reporting tools.

Activity Types

DonorDock includes several Activity types for tracking different kinds of engagement and work.

Some Activity types include additional tools specific to their purpose. For example, Tasks can be assigned to Project Boards, while Asks can be managed through AskBoards and Ask Stages.

Complete and Incomplete Activities

When creating an Activity, you can indicate whether it is already Complete or is still Incomplete.

Use a Complete Activity when you are recording something that has already occurred, such as a phone call you just completed or a meeting that took place earlier in the day.

Use an Incomplete Activity when the Activity represents something that still needs to happen. Incomplete Activities can be assigned to a team member and, when applicable, added to their ActionBoard so the work can be tracked until it is completed.

Activities may also be marked Canceled when the planned Activity will no longer be completed.

Assigning Activities to Team Members

Activities do not have to be created for yourself.

Depending on the Activity type, the Assigned To, By, or similar user field can be used to identify the team member responsible for the Activity. If the Activity is incomplete and has been added to the ActionBoard, it will appear for the assigned team member to manage and complete.

How Activities Can Be Created

Activities can enter DonorDock in several different ways depending on your workflow. They may be created manually by a team member, imported from another system or spreadsheet, or created automatically as part of an Automation.

Manually Created Activities

Team members can create Activities directly throughout DonorDock when recording something that has already happened or planning work that still needs to be completed.

Activities can be created manually from areas including:

• The Quick Add menu

• A Contact record

• The ActionBoard

• A Campaign record

• An Appeal record

• Certain Gift records

• Reports

This gives your team the flexibility to create the Activity while already working in the part of DonorDock most relevant to the interaction.

Imported Activities

The Import tool can be used to bring Activity records into DonorDock in bulk. This is especially useful during a data migration or when historical engagement information has been maintained in another system or spreadsheet.

Both completed and incomplete Activities may be imported, allowing you to preserve historical interactions while also bringing over future follow-up work that still needs attention.

Activities Created Through Automations

Activities can also be created automatically as steps within DonorDock Automations. This allows your organization to build follow-up work directly into repeatable processes instead of relying on a team member to manually create each Activity.

For example, an Automation may create a Task for a team member after a particular donor action occurs or create another Activity as part of a larger stewardship or fundraising workflow. Once created, automated Activities can be managed alongside Activities entered manually or through imports.

Automations only create Activities when your organization has configured and published the Automation containing that step. This allows your team to determine which processes should generate Activities and how those Activities fit into your workflow.

Tracking Activities

After an Activity has been created, it becomes part of the contact's engagement history and can be viewed from areas such as the contact's Activity and Gift Timeline, the ActionBoard, Campaigns and Appeals, or Activity Reports.

You can also use Activities in reporting to review completed interactions, upcoming work, volunteer activity, event participation, fundraising asks, and other engagement across your organization.

Custom Fields for Activities

The standard fields included with each Activity type are designed to cover common tracking needs, but your organization may need to capture additional information that is specific to your own processes.

Activity Custom Fields can be created for information that is not covered by the standard Activity fields. This allows you to extend Activity records with organization-specific data while still keeping that information connected to the Activity itself.

For example, you might create custom fields to track an internal category, event detail, follow-up outcome, service type, or another piece of information that is important to your workflow but does not have a dedicated standard field.

Using Activity Custom Fields can help your organization keep important information structured and reportable instead of relying entirely on freeform Notes.