Managing your Custom Fields
View a walk-through of Custom Fields in the emfluence ClickLearn section here.
In addition to the standard contact data fields, each standard Platform account can create up to 25 custom fields (this can be expanded to 250 fields for clients who need more custom fields). These fields can be used to store specific information about your contacts, such as:
- Text, alpha-numeric content, i.e. Last product purchased, Account Representative Name or Email address, Area of Interest/Study, Favorite location, etc. Maximum length for a text field is 1000. Text fields can also be assigned picklist values to limit optional values for this field.
- Numeric, a number-only value, up to 14 characters, i.e. Quantity purchased, Order number, etc.
- Money, a numeric field but with a fixed 2 decimal places. Currency symbols cannot be stored in this field type (you can use text type for that if you'd prefer).
- Date, in the format M/D/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY OR YYYY/MM/DD, i.e. customer anniversary, semester start date, etc. Dates will be displayed as M/D/YYYY.
- True/False, or boolean, in the format True/False or 1/0, i.e. if a contact is a Current client, Paid Member, etc.
To manage your Custom Fields, go to the Options menu. In the middle column, click on Custom Fields.
From here, you can create or edit the custom fields that you would like to use to store specific data on your contacts.
To create a new custom field, click New Custom Field. Type the friendly name, the data type and length (where applicable) for your field data. You also can have the ability to add an optional internal description of the field which will only show up inside the emfluence Platform.
If you are creating a Text field and you want to assign a list of preset values (i.e. a picklist) you can do this by adding the values underneath during setup. NOTE: Picklists only work for text fields and if you include them in emfluence forms and someone saves an unsupported value it won't get written to that field (in this case you would want to use a single select or radio button choices matching the values for this field.
Edit an existing custom field by clicking on the title.
You can change the name, the description, the max characters (for text field) or the type of the field, i.e. text, numeric, date, money or true/false.
NOTE: If you change the data type of a field, all existing data in that field will be cleared. You will receive 2 warnings prior to making this change, once when you change the type and then again when you attempt to save. Also, you cannot shorten a text field to anything less than the smallest value you currently have saved on a contact record. If you choose a value too small, you will receive an error telling you (based on the data saved in your account) what values can be used.
You can find your Custom Fields, and the values an individual contact has for those fields, when you view a contact record.
When creating or managing custom fields, you can enable picklist values to be used for journey reporting. Create a text field (or edit an existing field), check the box to enable Journey Reporting, and add one or more stages as picklist values. Journey Reporting will then automatically be added to your home page dashboard. Using a custom field in this manner will allow you to assign specific values to contacts in your account and track each contact's current status. For more on setting up a Journey Stage and using Journey Reporting, click here.