The Institute for Public Service reports the number of people the institute's staff works with to the University and many others. IPS has defined a contact as:
a verified exchange of information in-person or electronically between IPS staff and external customers.
Contacts come from a direct email exchange, phone calls, text messages, and opened bulk email messages (as counted by the email mass mailing systems). Additionally, contacts include conference and/or training attendees who are not registered in the learning management system. Customers in virtual or in-person meetings are included in contacts. Downloads of documents, brochures, and TRACE are recorded as contacts.
Some examples:
- A call to one customer counts as 1 contact.
- A presentation to a governing body of 7 counts as 7 contacts, unless there are 20 people in the audience and then it would be 27 contacts.
- Mailing a letter or publication, sending a blast email, sending an email from your Outlook account to multiple people, or being on a radio show do not count as contacts.
When you are working on a project in your office that does not involve contacting the customer, the correct contact entry is 0. If you are teaching a class that is part of the MTAS training program, do not enter contacts for participants as they are already counted in the LMS. Class participants whom you talk with outside of the class itself would be counted as a contact. See How to Count Conference and Training Contacts in Work Reporting for more information on training participants.