Introduction to Silent Partner Desktop Console: navigation and definitions
Welcome to Silent Partner Desktop Console!
Silent Partner Desktop is a Donation Management System. It was designed to track donors and their gifts to your organization, and to provide you with a clear audit trail. In this article, we'll discuss the basics of navigation in Silent Partner, some definitions and terms, and provide an overview of processes.
Green Screen
When you open Silent Partner Desktop you arrive at the Green Screen. There are several ways to locate the function you want:
- Function menu across the top
- Keyboard shortcuts, like Fn + F11
- Tool bar buttons
Hovering your mouse pointer over a button provides a description of the button’s function. In the example below, the mouse pointer is hovering over the button with the three people on it (even though you can't see the pointer!) The description tells you what action the button performs.
Main Functions in Silent Partner
Donor data, where you find all information about your supporters, enter new supporters, create mailing lists, or run reports.
Enter donations, where you create a batch and enter gifts.
Post Donations, where batches of gifts are posted, or made permanent. Up until you post a batch, all the gifts in a batch can be edited or deleted.
Cloud sync - if your organization subscribes to Silent Partner Cloud service, this is how you sync data up to the Cloud so that the most current information in the desktop shows in the Cloud (and vice versa.)
In the Toolbar you will also see a few other buttons in addition to those available in the centre of the Green Screen. From left to right, these buttons allow you to produce receipts, backup your database, and restore your database from a backup.
Key Terms and Definitions
- Scope: A list of donor records displayed in the Donor Data area. Creating a scope allows you to limit the records included when you create a merge file, create envelopes, mailing labels, tag donors, etc.
- Filter: Filtering records is a way to create a scope or list of records. There are predefined Filters as well as Queries. You can also create your own Query to retrieve exactly the records you want. A quick search will reveal several query and filter articles in the self-help knowledge base!
- Tag: A temporary way to mark records - Note that the number of tagged records is reflected at the top of the page next to the total number of records
- Flag: Another method of marking a record. Flagging a record changes the colour of the record so that the text is red and the background colour is orange. A flagged record is easy to identify in a scope, and you can filter your records to create a scope of only flagged records. There is only this one, user-defined, flag option in Silent Partner; it can be useful to mark important donors, as an example.
Records are also automatically flagged when a donor is marked as deceased by turning the text orange. - Batch: A virtual "bucket" used to collect donations. You can add, remove and edit gifts in a batch as much as you want. Once a gift is posted, the gifts in that batch become permanent.
- Gift Reversal: Once a gift is posted, to correct it you enter the gift again, identical in every way to the original gift but with the amount as a negative. These two gifts cancel each other out. For example, the original gift of $100 was made to the General account on June 1st. To reverse this gift you would create a gift of -$100 to the General account on June 1st. You can then re-enter the gift correctly. You can find more information by clicking here.
- Contact: A record of an email, a phone call, a mailing, etc.
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