You can create one or more stakeholder centers in your database to track your communications with other resource partners, local government agencies, congressional offices, banks, chambers of commerce, etc.. Because the stakeholder center is designed to track communications with non-clients, it cannot be published on eCenter Direct. In fact, all standard eCenter Direct functionality is disabled under this center.

You may even consider creating two stakeholder centers: one for your resource partners as discussed above, and one for your internal staff. Having your staff in your Neoserra database allows you to assign them to various training events as attendees, without counting them as clients.

• Configuring Stakeholder Center
• Stakeholder Client Type
• Data Conversion
• Stakeholders as Training Attendees
• Transferring to the Stakeholder Center
• Transferring from the Stakeholder Center

Configuring Stakeholder Center

You can designate a center as a stakeholder center by changing the Center Type to "Stakeholder:"

NOTE: Just because you name a center the Stakeholder Center" this does not change the functionality in Neoserra. You must select the "Stakeholder" type to enable the behavior referenced in this FAQ.

If you designate a center as the stakeholder center, then you may not make it public. Changing the status to public will cause the following validation error when saving the record:

Most of the other fields on the stakeholder record may remain blank with the exception of the configuration masks. You will need to designate a Client ID format for your stakeholders:

Even though the training mask is required, you should be aware that the Training Event module is disabled for stakeholder centers. You are not able to create events under the stakeholder center. Again, the sole purpose for stakeholder centers is to track non-reportable communications with your partners.

Stakeholder Client Type

Client records that are newly created in a stakeholder center or transferred to a stakeholder center will always have a designation of "Stakeholder:"

Since you don't need to track business size, number of employees or household size of your stakeholders, Neoserra offers custom client and contact field requirement interfaces where you can designate how much information you want, or need, to gather for each partner. Neoserra database administrators in administrator-mode can go to the Administration|Configuration|Field Requirements panel to choose those fields that they want to include on a stakeholder record:

By default, your client user-defined fields are not included on your stakeholder record (see orange highlights below), however, your Neoserra database administrator can choose what system and/or user-defined fields to include on your stakeholder record by going to Administration|Configuration|Field Requirements. Notice below, that many of the standard "client" fields have been made invisible for the stakeholder center (green highlight) since they do not pertain to stakeholders:

For more information about modifying your Field Requirements, please refer here.

The primary reason to enter stakeholders into the Neoserra database is so that you can track communications with your partners. However, this communications should not be included on your quarterly or annual reports. In other words, if you are working with a buyer at one of the local military bases on behalf of a client, then you may want to track your communications with the buyer, but these exchanges are not reportable to your funding partner. Similarly, if you are speaking with a congressional aide about your congress member's participation in one of your events, then tracking this communications may be helpful, but again, the actual time spent working with the congress member's office is not reportable.

For this reason, you cannot select a "stakeholder" center within your scorecard definition. Furthermore, you cannot export stakeholder data via the Nexus export module. And, all counseling with a "stakeholder" record-only will, by default, be marked as non-reportable:

This also means that any emails that are sent to a stakeholder record using the postbox address will automatically be marked as non-reportable, with one notable exception: If you email a client AND a stakeholder, and you include the postbox address, then this message will be marked as reportable! This one exception allows you to include stakeholders in your correspondence with your clients without having to delete them from the session record in order to make the session reportable.

And, while you can technically create milestones, capital funding and award records for your stakeholders, we are hard pressed to find a valid case when this would be relevant. Nonetheless, all activity logged with a stakeholder record-only will be marked as non-reportable by default.

Creating a Stakeholder Client

To create a new stakeholder record in the Neoserra database, make sure that your selected center is a center with the type of "Stakeholder":

Go to View|Clients and click "New:"

The only record type you can create under the stakeholder center is a stakeholder record, as shown above. Complete the information on the determination screen. Click "Save" to proceed to the full record, keeping in mind that the full stakeholder may be a condensed record based upon the field requirements selected by your database adminstrator.

Since the Stakeholder center does not have a presence on eCenter Direct, the newly created stakeholder record will not generate a welcome message to eCenter Direct.

Data Conversion

If you already have a center in your database for purposes of tracking communications with your resource partners, then you can edit this center and set the Center Type to "Stakeholder." However, this does not change the records that were already associated with this center. In other words, if you had client or pre-client records assigned to this center, then you may contact OutreachSystems to convert the clients/pre-clients assigned to the newly designated "Stakeholder" center to stakeholder records.

Of course, all newly created/transferred records will automatically be set up as stakeholder records.

Stakeholders as Training Attendees

As noted above, the Training Events module is not available under the stakeholder center. In other words, you cannot create training events in the stakeholder center. However, your stakeholders can be training attendees in non-stakeholder centers.

A stakeholder that attends your event will be counted as an attendee but NOT as a client served. And for federally-funded programs it should be noted that the stakeholder record will never be exported either to SBA or DoD.

Additionally, it should be noted that while stakeholders are not expected to interact with eCenter Direct, because they are not clients of your program, they can receive and respond to event surveys via eCenter Direct similar to clients:

Transferring to the Stakeholder Center

You can transfer an existing client or pre-client to the center marked as a Stakeholder center:

Doing so will set the client to the "Stakeholder" type and assign the stakeholder a new ID. Because the stakeholder record is a condensed version of the client/pre-client record there may be less data shown on the stakeholder record. For example, the database administrator may configure the stakeholder record with less data fields since type of business, veteran or gender ownership do not really apply to stakeholders. When you transfer a client into a stakeholder center this previously entered information is simply not shown on the screen, but it is not removed from the database should you ever need to retrieve it.

Keep in mind that any activity with the client prior to moving them to the stakeholder center may have been reportable. When you move the client to the stakeholder, all subsequent activity with this record will be marked as non-reportable but Neoserra will no change any activity already entered into the database. It will be up to you to review the history of the record to determin whether those sessions should be changed to non-reportable.

If you need to move a batch of clients at once to a stakeholder center, then you can use the "Batch Update" feature within Neoserra. The Batch Update feature functions the same way in that the clients being updated will all be designated as stakeholders with a new ID:

This is also a step you will need to do if you previously had a center that you used as a stakeholder center but which was not designated as a stakeholder center. This step is required to update the type of record within the center.

Transferring from the Stakeholder Center

You can also, of course, transfer a stakeholder from the stakeholder center to another non-stakeholder center:

Stakeholders transferred to another center will always be transferred as pre-clients. If you need to convert the stakeholder to a client record (as opposed to a pre-client record) then you can first transfer them to a non-stakeholder center and then choose the More|Make Client option. Again, keep in mind that all activity entered while they were a stakeholder record, will be non-reportable. Neoserra will not alter any past activity.

Want more? Browse our extensive list of Neoserra FAQs.