Federation's Base System

The heart of Federation software is a contact management system, forming the foundation on which all other modules stand. This base system is a required element of any Federation installation. To see graphically how base system relates to the other modules, click here.

One side a contact management system is getting data IN, and Federation includes many sophisticated tools for entering, searching, fixing duplicates, handling deletions, and so forth. The other side of a contact management system is getting data OUT. Here, too, Federation offers a wealth of options including prebuilt reports, extensive criteria choices, data exports, custom querying, and more.

The following sections provide detail on the features that come standard in Federation's base system.

Contact Management
Federation's contact management system provides a community rolodex and more. Because this information is centralized instead of on individual machines, everyone on your network has access to the same updated information.

Contacts are classified as either a person or an organization. Persons can be organized into households. One person can be linked to multiple organizations, and vice verse. Standard contact information includes addresses, phone numbers, emails, faxes, demographics, affiliations, household information, tags, skills, contact notes, and custom fields.

The contact manager smoothly integrates information from optional features that you have installed. These optional features appear as subscreens of the contact management screen. Your installation may show membership information, service delivery history, event involvement, volunteering history, referrals, donation history, customer information, marketing, and project history. These sections can be viewed and edited for each contact in your database.

Contact Searching
Searching for any contact is as easy as typing in any fragment of their name. Find the matching name, double-click, and you're in to the detail view. The main contact search screen allows many options for filtering and sorting. You can even customize the search screen by choosing an additional field from the database to display, which then becomes searchable and sortable.

Specialized search screens also exist for contact notes, skills, and all of the optional modules.

Data Hygiene
Federation software is designed to keep data “clean” – a concept referred to as data hygiene. A clean database has consistently applied formats, no duplication, no spelling errors, no missing required data, and other characteristics that are essential in searching, summarizing, and communicating. Some of Federation's data hygiene features are:

• A controlled interface allows no access to raw data.
• Data entry fields are designed to accept only appropriate information, to the extent that this is appropriate.
• Lookup lists control data input options, auto-fill for speedy entry, and eliminate spelling mistakes.
• Any time a new person or organization is entered, Federation scans the database to see if it might be a duplicate with a previously entered record. Records are scanned across three dimensions – name, phone number, and address.
• The Duplicate Combiner utility combines two contact records into one, solving any accidental duplication problems in seconds.
• Deletion of any record in Federation is handled very carefully and only after extensive validation.
• Listbuilder allows searches for contacts missing preferred numbers.
• Household information is stored as a single record, avoiding duplication of entry for each household member.
• Geographic units are managed in a central database, allowing autofills of any previously entered names and its related elements.

List Builder
Federation's List Builder allows you to assemble lists of persons and/or organizations from your contact list based on many layers of criteria including tags, address, contact notes, and any criteria from other modules that are installed. The combinations of options numbers in the trillions.

Once the list is built and reviewed, you can then choose an output, including printable contact lists (at any level of detail), mailing labels, envelopes, mail merge, broadcast email, data file exports, name badges, batch assignment of contact notes, and batch tag assignment.

Listbuilder's communication features are streamlined because they all use the "preferred" numbers for phone, fax, email, and address. Federation allows you to enter many contact numbers, but carefully helps you manage which of those numbers are the "preferred" version for any category.

Tags
Tags are a way of categorizing contacts into lists so you can quickly print reference lists, generate emails, and send mailings. You can assign an unlimited number of tags to contacts. Tag assignments are independent of the person/organization affiliation, meaning that if you assign a tag to a person, that tag will not appear on the organization affiliated with that person and visa-versa. Tags are completely customizable and may be arranged to create layers, for example: ‘Board Members>Marketing Committee>2006'.

Skills
Keep track of skills, interests, and capacities for every person and organization. You can distinguish if the entity “has” the skill or is “in need” of the skill, which sets the stage for coordinating matchups among contacts in your database. Even organizations can be coded as having or needing skills, which is useful in matching up volunteers for assisting a local nonprofit organization. Skills can be organized into layers of categories and subcategories if desired. A convenient Find Skills screen allows quick access to information.

Notes Log
Contact notes are a historical log of dated communications with persons and organizations. A category option allows you to classify the contact anyway you wish and is customizable using the Lookup List Management feature. Typical categories include meeting, conversation, email, and mailing. Contact notes can be thousands of characters in length, and are fully searchable based on any aspect of the note.

Contact notes can be declared "case notes" which makes them undeletable if needed for HIPAA regulations. Notes can also be cross-linked to programs (an optional module) and then be protected by security rules.

Tickler Report
When you create a note in the notes log, you have the option of entering a follow-up date. Follow-up reminders are displayed to you in the Tickler report, which can be set to display automatically at log in time, showing only the actions required by the logged in user. The Tickler report also pulls in action dates from other optional modules that you choose.

The follow-up reminders for contact notes can also be queried in Listbuilder, to carry out batch mailing, for example, to everyone having a follow-up action that is still pending a response.

Custom Fields
Federation lets you create an unlimited number of custom (user-defined) fields that relate to persons and households. These fields appear for each person allow you to record information of the most unique types imaginable. For example, you may create a field called “Have Permission Slip on File”, and keep track of this information independently for each person. On the reporting side, you can produce lists of people who do or don’t have their permission slip on file. You can define the data type (date, number, currency, text, True/False) for each UDF. This provides great precision when querying for groups of people, allowing filters date ranges, number ranges, currency ranges, text matches, and True/False status.

Legislative Affairs Management
You can identify all of the legislative districts in which a contact (person or organization) has representation. This provides you with the ability to manage public affairs issues with tremendous efficiency. Trying to manage a political action campaign? Federation can send an email blast to every member in affected legislative districts. Want to keep members informed about the status of a certain bill? Generate a customized mail merge document targeted to just those members that are affected. Federation's legislative district management system is flexible enough to handle any type of political system, so it can be used in any country, and track jurisdictions in any combination of countries.

Batch Email and Fax
Send email to a group of recipients as defined by the List Builder process. If the list contains contacts lacking email addresses, a second step is offered, providing the ability to communicate with those contacts in another way, such as a mail merge letter. Federation can also be connected to an existing electronic faxing program to automate that process as well.

Sandbox
Sandbox provides an unrestricted database environment for “power users” to build custom queries and reports using your real data. This is an important feature for individuals who are familiar and comfortable with Access and who want to create specialized reports that are not available in the standard options. As a security precaution, the Sandbox creates a copy of the original database; the user will not be able to alter data while using the Sandbox.

Security
Federation offers several ways to define your security settings. The Database Administrator can define a list of users and their passwords, define security groups, assign users to those groups, and assign rights to each group. Security can be controlled at both the system level and local level. Specialized security options exist for programs, projects, and case management notes.

Favorites
Favorites, located in the Main Menu of Federation, acts as a container for shortcuts to frequently used features. For example, you may find that you use Contacts, List Builder, Send Email, and New Person often enough that you would like a more convenient way to access them. Each user can independently define their favorites.

Report Manager
The report manager is a single screen where you can find all of Federation's reports in one place, conveniently organized by category. Many of these reports are also available from other screens where the context is appropriate to launch them. Most reports include an options screen that allows for many variations.

Lookup List Management
The contents of nearly every look-up list (or “drop down” list) in Federation can be controlled from the Lookup List Manager. Add to or delete from the lists to change the options available to you on the corresponding screens and lists elsewhere in the database. Federation's Lookup List Manager allows you to fully control options like note types, tags, and legislative districts.

Help System
Federation's integrated Help System includes links to topic specific help on each screen, as well as a collection of all help topics in the Toolbox. The help system can be printed topic by topic or the entire collection for a handy bookshelf reference.

Personalized Login Screen
For a personal touch, you may want to display your company's logo on the Welcome screen of the application. Federation allows you to replace the default graphic with anything you want.