Tracking Phone calls and contacts

I work with parents, teachers and other central office personnel in a large school district and need a way to track phone calls, emails and other communcations. I have tried creating my own paper phone log and using a MS Access database, but can't seem to find a template that allows me to print a report for monthly calls, track which parent has called and at a glance see their past calls and also pull up calls about a particular child. The paper log is not efficient for looking back when there is a question about past communications. Any suggestions?

In a past job I used a customizable contact manage application for Windows named Commence. It's still available and even though the developer markets it as a CRM system, it is a flexible database that can be customised and requires not programming to set up.

You can define your own tables, e.g. Parents, Children, Phone Calls, etc and then connect the tables very simply. Working from your Phone Call table, you could easily select the parent that called and fill in other fields, e.g. notes, checkboxes (e.g. f/up) radio button fields, etc. It was a really neat system.

Reporting wasn't its strong suit but I could always get enough out of it given my needs were simple, and it could also send data to Word.

www.commence.com

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Originally Posted by mtallen

I work with parents, teachers and other central office personnel in a large school district and need a way to track phone calls, emails and other communcations. I have tried creating my own paper phone log and using a MS Access database, but can't seem to find a template that allows me to print a report for monthly calls, track which parent has called and at a glance see their past calls and also pull up calls about a particular child. The paper log is not efficient for looking back when there is a question about past communications. Any suggestions?

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A couple of thoughts: It seems to me that volume and intended use are key here. Is this for personal use, or is it used to report to someone else? Or is it shared? Do you need fast access to past records when someone contacts you? If the information is for personal use, I would probably try a lightweight information manager like Evernote. However, due to student record confidentiality issues, I would prefer something with local storage only. That's platform-dependent, and I can't make specific suggestions for Windows.

Question? In your student information system, do you have writes which would allow you to add information to a student's discipline file?

I am a former principal and central office administrator. As a principal, I went to the list of discipline infractions and added one more. I called it "Communication Documentation" and gave it a code of 0.0 so that it sorted to the top of the list.

Notes from phone calls and parent conferences were entered into the discipline record and given the infraction code of "0.0."

Whenever I wanted to see a list of the communication I had regarding that student, every student in that homeroom, every student in the grade level, or whatever combination I desired, I ran a discipline report filtered only to show infraction 0.0.

At the end of the year, I printed a hard copy of the 0.0 stuff sorted by grade level and with a secondary sort on last name. Worked like a charm.

From your post, it looks like you are at the central office. I don't know how principals would feel about you being able to add to a student's discipline records, and I don't know how you would feel about principals being able to read the notes from phone calls.

I had suggested using the Student Information System since everything you enter will automatically be tied to that one student, and you would be able to view your notes for that student, grades, attendance, discipline, etc. altogether.

If that does not seem to be a good option, I would suggest Evernote. Create a notebook called something like "Student Log." Every new phone call, parent conference, etc. becomes a new note. For the sake of consistency, title every note with the name of the student involved. The note will be automatically date and time stamped.

Use tags to help you easily sort what you are looking for. A would create a tag with the name of each school. Create a tag for each type of call you get (or place). "Complaint about teacher," "Commendation," "Attendance," "Discipline," "Grades." That way, you could easily find all notes from a particular, all notes from across the district which dealt with attendance, all notes from a particular school which dealt with discipline, all notes regarding a commendation for students, or any combination.

Set up a separate notebook called "Employee Log." (If you wanted to combine the student and employee one into one log, that's OK too.) Tags would be the name of each school (and since you have already created them for students, those are already there), "Commendation," "Concern," "Reprimand," etc. You can create tags as you go, so don't worry about having to get the entire list correct from the start. You can also add and change tags on any note you have already composed at any time.