Best Of

@Karen Diener Good question. I don't know.

One of 3 very different criteria listed on request form for a mailing solicitation to go in August. Seems very odd to me. Now that I've figured out a fairly painless way to pull odd years I haven't asked. As I tend to question a lot of their things I'm really trying to only question when I makes a difference to the actual data I pull. LOL

@Dan Snyder If I were to go the excel route that's what I was thinking of - like that fill the series/pattern.

I'm going with @Sara Barnaby suggestion - was 5 quick criteria. Thanks for that - don't know that I've used ‘like’ in that way. Great idea.

@Elizabeth Johnson and @JoAnn Strommen This is what I would likely do and even if you don't have them in Excel there is a trick I like to use for this. If you type the first 3 odd class years (ex. 1951, 1953, 1955) in their own cell (oldest to newest), select those three fields, then in the bottom right corner of the bottom most cell once your cursor turns to a + symbol, click and hold and pull that list down and it will fill them in as odd numbers since that is the pattern you gave Excel to follow. Then all you have to do is pull down until you get to 2023 or 2025.

@Spring Velazquez Yes, please do! liz_dixon-eversole@milton.edu

@Maxwell Lisanti In the past, I've found that the Post Office actually appeared to have made a mistake with the spelling of a local city in their system that was causing an issue with a constituent's mail generated from our database not getting delivered. I had to suggest they go into their local Post Office to find out why there was a discrepancy, then later found the city name changed when the next NCOA update occurred with our database. USPS isn't infallible.

@Teresa Caruthers I am going to agree with Dariel and add some other information. The problem with any kind of email finder is they usually look at the address as opposed to the person, so you can end up with others at the address like parents, children, etc. I feel that email finders are not worth the money since you can end up with the wrong emails and the fact the people change their emails a good bit to begin with.

@Alex Wong

We're both a school and a foundation, so we use the gift subtype to indicate if the gift is to the School or the Foundation.

@Rachel Kauer That's boo boo… I do believe that these roles do get a bit conflated…there's not much overlap between a traditional DBA and advancement database managers and admins. However, many organizations don't have organizational structure or a human resources team that knows the difference. le sigh. But, it's still disappointing.