Use the ThirdSectorBee add-in for Outlook to record an email, or a whole conversation, on the timelines of the people you were writing to, without leaving your inbox. Each message becomes an Email touchpoint, so colleagues can see when you were last in touch and what it was about.

Before you start

  • You need a ThirdSectorBee account, relationships:read:contacts to look people up and relationships:write:touchpoints to log emails. To create a contact for someone new, you also need relationships:write:contacts.
  • The add-in signs in to one beehive. If your account belongs to more than one beehive, it can’t tell which one to use and logging won’t work; use the web app instead.
  • Logging a Whole conversation needs permission to read your mail through Microsoft. Some organisations require a Microsoft 365 administrator to approve this once. Without it, you can still log the email you have open.

Install the add-in

The add-in isn’t in the Outlook add-in store. It’s installed from its manifest file, usually by whoever manages Outlook add-ins for your organisation. Once it’s installed, an Add to ThirdSectorBee button appears on the Outlook ribbon, in a ThirdSectorBee group, when you’re reading or writing an email. It works in Outlook on the web and on the desktop.

Sign in

  1. Open an email and choose Add to ThirdSectorBee. A panel opens beside the message.
  2. Under Sign in to ThirdSectorBee, enter the Email and Password you use for ThirdSectorBee and choose Sign in.
  3. If you’re asked to set a new password, enter it in New password and choose Set password & sign in.

You stay signed in across Outlook restarts. Choose Sign out at the top of the panel to sign out.

Log an email or a conversation

  1. With an email open, choose Add to ThirdSectorBee.
  2. Choose This message to log only the open email, or Whole conversation to log every message in its thread. The panel shows how many messages it found and how many touchpoints are ready.
  3. Check the Participants list. People whose email address matches a contact show Matched.
  4. For anyone without a match, choose Create contact if you want them recorded. The contact is created with their email address and, where Outlook shows one, a name split into first and last name. Leave them alone if you don’t.
  5. Choose Add N touchpoints.

When it finishes, you’ll see “Added N. N skipped (no contact). N failed.” Messages to or from people you didn’t create a contact for are skipped.

What gets recorded

For each message, one touchpoint is added to each of the other people on it:

The message Touchpoint on
Sent to you The sender, as an inbound Email touchpoint
Sent by you Each recipient in To and Cc, as an outbound Email touchpoint

The touchpoint uses the message’s date and time, and its note holds the subject, a short preview of the body and an identifier for the message. The full email and its attachments aren’t copied into ThirdSectorBee.

A person is matched only when a contact has exactly the same email address. If no Email touchpoint type exists in your beehive yet, it’s created the first time.

Logging the same email twice creates a second touchpoint for it. The add-in doesn’t check what you’ve logged before, so log each message or conversation once. If you log a whole conversation after logging one of its messages, that message is recorded again.

If something goes wrong

What you see What to do
“Please set a new password to finish signing in.” Choose a new password; this happens the first time you sign in with a temporary password
Sign-in fails Check the email and password work in the ThirdSectorBee web app
“Could not load the conversation” Your organisation may not have approved mail access for the add-in. Choose This message instead, or ask your Microsoft 365 administrator
“No contacts found in these messages.” The only other address on the messages was your own
“Could not create contact” Check you hold relationships:write:contacts
Some touchpoints failed Check you hold relationships:write:touchpoints and that you can see the contact. Log the missing ones by hand in ThirdSectorBee: logging the message again would record the successful ones a second time