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Our development staff are using activities for tracking moves management. We've created a custom set of "moves management action types" and have added those to appropriate civicrm activities. I can't, however, figure out if there is a way to assign custom fields to the "Send an Email" activity type. I'd like to be able to assign the same action types to the "Send an Email" activity type for reporting purposes.

Anyone have any ideas how to do this, or an alternative approach?

Thanks!

-tim

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  • 1
    "Our development staff are using activities for tracking moves management." Can you please elaborate why you and how you are using activities for moves management rather than managing contribution status or custom fields? Sep 5, 2016 at 18:27
  • Development staff meet with, send emails to and call donors and prospective donors, and we use civicrm activities to record those interactions. Each activity our development staff engage in can be categorized as either Stewardship, Solitication, Follow-up, or Closing (these are custom fields in a custom field set assigned to civicrm activities). This custom field set is available, once configured, to all activity types except send email.
    – Tim
    Sep 6, 2016 at 22:29
  • Q/ what is 'moves management"? A/ Moves management is a term used primarily with the non-profit sector in relationship to donor development. It refers to the process by which a prospective donor is moved from cultivation to solicitation. “Moves” are the actions an organization takes to bring in donors, establish relationships, and renew contributions
    – petednz - fuzion
    Nov 6, 2016 at 21:41

2 Answers 2

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Tim, as far as I know, you can't currently add custom fields to the built-in Send an Email activity.

An alternative approach would be to use the scheduled reminder functionality.

  1. create a new activity type for this email and create a scheduled reminder for this new activity type when status = completed (or some other suitable status) and time = '0 hours after activity date time'
  2. You have access to all activity fields and custom fields as tokens in the scheduled reminder field so the simplest approach would be to include {activity.subject} as the email subject and put {activity.details} in the body.
  3. Give it a go. I'd be interested to know if this approach works for you. In theory, it should work but I have not implemented it in practice.
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  • Ingenious workaround. Jul 13, 2021 at 14:48
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Another option - if you are using Drupal - would be to have the team entering the data through a Webform which then gives you greater finesse in terms of what gets sent to whom by way of emails.

(Note: currently there is a patch (RBTC) required in order to get the Contact ID of an existing Contact rendered as the Display Name - https://www.drupal.org/node/2672482)

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