You'll be pleased to know you can now add and edit contacts in Coco.

Go to a contact, and click Edit to edit their contact information. Intuitive!

Here's the deal: because you share you Coco data with your sending agency and possibly others in it, it's important to enter your contact data in a standardized fashion. To see examples of data for each field, or if you aren't sure what is expected in a field, just mouse over the field and examples will pop-up.

A common field with a lot of variance these days is the phone number. Proceed a country code with a plus sign, put area or city codes in parenthesis, and key in the local number as most common in that area, using spaces or dashes for separators. A number with no country code is assumed to be a U.S. number.

Good examples:

(940) 555-1212
+86 (21) 6258 0000
Bad examples:

940-555-1212
940.555.1212
86 21 6258 0000

Your personal contact information will not be used by your organization unless that person makes a donation. Other Coco users within your organzation can share your contact information only if they search for that specific contact by name and find them in the Coco database. Your notes and calls are always private.

Another important one are the email fields. The Email field is the main email, then you'll notice that the Alt Email 1 field has a little (cc:) by it, this means if you use Coco to send out email newsletters, the email in the Alt Email 1 field will also receive the email. Only put one email in each of those fields! You can put whatever you want in Alt Email 2, as that's just for you to store whatever. No emails will be sent automatically to Alt Email 2.

If you have personal information, notes, etc. that you want to include, see the other topic about adding notes, etc. Only you can see your notes. So keep the shared data neat and tidy. The nice thing is, if someone else (or the office) gets updated information on a contact, it will automatically appear in your records.

You can also Add Contacts. Under People, Contacts, click on Add Contact. First it guides you through searching Coco for the contact. This way we can help ensure we don't have 10 copies of someone. If you're adding the Cobbles, key in "cob" in the search field. Everyone (and all organizations) with the first three letters of "cob" in their last name (or org name) will show up. To add Chris and Antonia to your list, click on their name, then click on Add. Now if you click on C in your contact list, the Cobbles will show up.

If you search and don't find a match, then click New Contact, and you can add whoever you want. If the search reveals no results it will take you directly to the page where you can add a new contact.

You'll notice that if you edit a contact that is shared, or that has given you money, the data doesn't change immediately, instead a Change Request appears. The office will look over your changes and approve them if they look good, or reject them if you did something silly. Note that only the accepted change requests will be exported and used for emailing newsletters, so before you do one of these, let the office know you've got some Change Requests that need to be looked over if they're being slow.

If someone hasn't given you money, you can remove them from your contact list by clicking Delete. If you're the only one that has that contact, the information will be deleted from Coco completely. If someone else is using it, obviously, they'll still have it.

I have a question on editing contact information. I know the office will be looking over the changes that we request for our contacts info, but how does the office no who has the correct contact information for this person?

For instance, say Joe Blow gave me a one time gift back in ought three but he also supports Wess as well. Wess stays in close contact with Joe and he knows that Joe got married and moved into a new house so he enters his current address onto Coco. I go to the office one day and notice that Joe's address is diffrent from the one in my database and I enter an old address that I had.

I'm wondering if it might be worth while figuring out if there was a way to contact everone who shares a certian contact when that contact is being updated. That would not only solve problems with conflicting data but also inform everyone of a change in address.

Indeed. My plan is to have Coco send you an email when Wes updates Joe Blow's contact information with both the old and new contact information. But right now, the scenario you described is a possibility.

However, you'll notice under the contact info there is detail on when the contact was entered and last updated, and by whom. So if you see Jow Blow's contact information was updated on 2006-Mar-31 by wcrawford you should assume he's got the most recent information.

Jimmy, I tried calling that 555-1212 number over and over, but I'm getting no answer. I tried dialing it with and without parethesis, and with both dots and dashes, but no one answered. What's the deal? I think Coco is broken. That or my computer is broken, one of the two.

Haha. Try the international number. It's for some taxi company in Shanghai. Everytime you get in that brand of cab you hear this English woman say, "Our service number is 6258-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh."

For some reason recordings of people with English accents stick in my head. Next time I see you I'll recite all the recorded announcements on the MTR trains in Hong Kong.

My favorite: "Please mind the platform screen doors."