ContribuTrac

Business Card Scanning

2009-08-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

To save you data entry time, we've created a tool for ContribuTrac that scans a business card, and creates a matching Contact in ContribuTrac.

The tool works with all CardScan scanners, the most popular business card scanners on the market.

Once you enter your passkey for your database, the tool detects your scanner. Put a card in the scanner, click Scan and the tool reads the data off the card.

Additionally, you can add any of your ContribuTrac codes and Notes to the contact. Confirm the results, and send to ContribuTrac.

If you're interested in this feature, just contact us.

Email Blast unsubscribe & Unlimited Communication types

2009-04-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

With todays update, ContribuTrac now supports the following:

Unlimited phone, address, or email types. Instead of just Home, Business, and Other (for address), you can add any set of designations you wish. For the time being, in order to add additional designations, just contact us, and we'll add them to your database.
Unsubscribe email footer for blast email. With this feature, you can give your contributors the option to unsubscribe to future email blasts. In the Blast dialog, under Options, check 'Add an unsubscribe link', and choose the committee you are blasting on behalf of.A footer will be appended to each email, with an unsubscribe link.If the recipient clicks the link, he'll be taken to a webpage where he can unsubscribe, which directly updates your ContribuTrac database, setting their Solicitation status to 'No Email'. If you are email blasting names not part of ContribuTrac's database, and your recipients click this link, an email will be sent to you indicating their request.
New Solicitation status. In addition to Do Not Mail status, contacts now have a Do Not Email status as well, to aid in tailoring your communications.

Floating window, more custom data room

2009-03-05T00:38:00.000-08:00

In ContribuTrac, you can check off rows you want to report on, or solicit in various ways. Sometimes, if you select a large number of contacts, it's useful to know how many are checked. This information is now displayed, along with an option to create a list from the checked contacts.

Also, there is now more room to enter information into your custom fields.

Quick View

2009-03-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

Today we added the Quick View to ContribuTrac. This is an alternate to the spreadsheet-like Grid that is the staple of ContribuTrac. The Quick view is leaner, searches faster, and shows selected contacts' detail in a pane on the right, like so:

You can edit or add new contacts here, and use the check column to mark contacts for emailing or merging. The tools available are:

For those of you with large databases (6000+ contacts), Quick View will load & search faster than the full featured grid. For quick contact lookup, or edits, Quick View is a good choice.

Introduction

2009-03-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Long overdue, this blog will cover ongoing feature enhancements to ContribuTrac. The purpose is to keep regular users informed, in the hopes they'll leverage the new additions to make their campaigning lives easier. I hope to also post tutorials on important topics.

The development of a piece of software is incremental, as the amount of time and effort is proportional to features. The initial launch of ContribuTrac was a small one, with just a couple of users. It started off running off of a Access database, with little more than data entry, the 'grid', and some Call Sheets.
Today it is a full-fledged solicitation machine, complete with Email Blaster, Document Merging, customized lists, house-holding, unlimited custom fields, codes, affiliations, and more. The database is industry titan Microsoft SQL Server, hosted online, so your data is accessible anywhere.
This is the ContribuTrac envisioned years ago, and that is why, now, the blog begins. The software is stable and robust enough to warrant a public presence.

For current users, I hope you'll find value in these posts, and for onlookers, maybe you'll see something that tempts you enough to get on board!