Microsoft Dynamics CRM [RIC]: Assigning Skills to your Contacts

Sumeet Singh, 01 August 2012

RIC (Relationship Information Centre): Not For Profits  

Do you want to be able to keep track of what skills your contacts have? Would you find it helpful if you could look at your contacts from a skills point of view? In this blog, I’ll show how you can not only assign skills to your contacts in RIC, but also look at all your contacts from a particular skills point of view.

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In my last blog, we looked at how your Volunteers can be managed in RIC. Adding and assigning skills to them (also applies to Donors and normal Contacts) is also quite straight forward. Let’s take a look at how this can be done.

Above we have a screen shot of the main skills menu with a list of skills that I have added to start off with. Before we look at how they’re assigned, let’s take a look at how we can add new/more skills to the list.

Adding a new skill to the list is very simple and straightforward – we can add a new skill by clicking “New” which will then open up a new skills window for us. (Refer to the screen shot above to see what this looks like). Enter in the skill required in the “Name” field, and “Save & Close”. The new skill will appear under our skills list.

Now that we know how to add skills into RIC, let’s now take a look at how we can assign these skills to our contacts. There are two ways this can be done; (a) from skills list, and (b) by opening up a contact record itself.  

To assign a skill from the skills menu, simply select and open up a skill that you want to assign. Once it’s open, click inside the Volunteers box to outline the box in blue and bring up new options at the top left ribbon. Click on “Records” and a drop down menu will appear.  From here we can select “Add Existing Contact”. This will pop open a new window for us to select the contacts required to assign the skill.  

Here we have our whole contacts list. We can “check” the contacts we want to assign the skill to and click “Add” and then “OK”. The skill will now be assigned to the selected contacts. We can now view all the contacts that have Event Management skill by just opening up the “Event Management” skill record, – how handy is that?!

The assigned skills also appear on the contact record itself. Let’s take a look at Cat Francis for example – once we’ve got the contact open, click on “Skills” tab on the left. Here we can see all the skills that have been assigned to the contact and we can also add/remove/edit skills from here. To add, simply click on “Add Existing Skill”, this will open up the list of skills available in our “Skills” tab.

So that covers adding and assigning skills to your contacts. Hopefully you have found this useful. Stay tuned for my next blog!

* mage from http://www.workinfo.com/free/cartoon/cartoon2.jpg