Setting Action Plans Against a Contact

As well as setting a new single To Do Activity against one or more Contacts you can also set an Action Plan against a single Contact or a group of Contacts. Action Plans are a series of multiple To Do Activities that will be performed in the future, for example a phone call next week, followed by an email the week after and so on. You will need to customise the supplied standard Action Plans first before you can set an Action Plan against a Contact - see the Action Plans chapter for instructions.

Once you have customised your standard Data Manager Action Plans you can start setting an Action Plan against a Contact.

Set a new Action Plan to a Single Contact

To set an Action Plan to a single Contact from your Data Manager Contacts database:

1. Go to the Data Manager Home Screen.

2. Click the Contacts button.

3. Locate the Contact you wish to create set the Action Plan for and click the Person Icon to the left of their First Name. You will now be viewing the full details for the selected Contact. See the section on Searching the Contacts database for instructions on how to find a Contact.

4. Click the Action Plans tab - this displays any To Do Activities/Action Plans previously entered for this Contact:

5. Click into the Select Action Plan field and a list of the current Action Plans in your copy of Data Manager will appear:

Select the Action Plan you wish to set against the current Contact and a new window will appear where you can set the starting date for the selected Action Plan:

Enter the date you want the selected Action Plan to commence from. A popup calendar will appear that you can use to select the required date. Click the Continue button to proceed with creating the To Do Activities that are part of the Action Plan that you selected for the current Contact. You will now see the Action Plan activities from the selected Action Plan have been created in the Action Plans tab for the selected Contact.

To the right of each To Do Activity are 3 buttons that perform as follows

- click this button to deleted this To Do Activity (Once you delete a To Do Activity it is permanently deleted and cannot be retrieved except from a backup copy that you have previously made of your copy of Data Manager. See the Backups section for information on backing up Data Manager). When you delete a Email Message in Data Manger you are presented with a warning dialog box confirming that you wish to delete this To Do Activity, allowing you to cancel the deletion in case you accidentally clicked this button. You can bypass the confirming dialog box by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the delete button.

- if the selected To Do Activity was created as part of an Action Plan and you would like to change the due date for this To Do Activity click this button to shuffle the date. Any other To Do Activities that were set as part of the same Action Plan that are NOT completed will also be shuffled based on the Interval Days (see the Action Plans chapter for more information on creating Action Plans in Data Manager).

The 3rd button is the button to perform the To Do Activity and changes depending on the Activity Type (if it is NOT one of the below Activity Types this button is blank). You click this button

The total number of To Do Activities for the Contact you are viewing also appears on the right hand side of the Action Plans tab in red:

An Example of an Action Plan

Each Action Plan includes a series of one or more tasks that need to be performed in the future after the Action Plan has been set against a Contact.  For example the Sample Action Plan looks like this:

The Sample Action Plan includes three actions over a 30 day period as follows:

• A Phone Call to the Contact 10 days after your nominated Action Plan start date.

• A Phone Call to the Contact 20 days after your nominated Action Plan start date.

• A Phone Call to the Contact 30 days after your nominated Action Plan start date.

If you set this Action Plan against a Contact and select 01/07/2008 as the nominated starting date it will create 3 To Do Activities as follows: