Constituent list timing out when Gift filters are used

Ben Regier

I support RENXT from the IT side and was working with one of our staff today to set up some lists that would be helpful to him. He's a fundraiser, so he wanted to be able to view constituents who gave to certain funds within a certain date range, and to view those constituents on a map.


So we started by creating a Constituent list, and then used the Fundraiser filter to select only the constituents where he is the fundraiser. So far so good.


Then we went to the Any Gift filter and added a fund and a date range. Now the list times out. We see the little green circles for a few minutes, and then an error message that we should try again later.



I checked the Blackbaud Status page, but it looks like all relevant systems are operational.


We found that if we also added a tag filter (say, for "at-risk" donors), it works properly, probably because it's dealing with a much smaller data set. But that doesn't really solve our problem, because he wants to see all constituents.


Is anyone else having trouble when they add Gift filters to a Constituent list? Our database is large, but not that large - I'm sure there are many BB customers with more gift and constituent records.

Dariel Dixon

Ben Regier:

I support RENXT from the IT side and was working with one of our staff today to set up some lists that would be helpful to him. He's a fundraiser, so he wanted to be able to view constituents who gave to certain funds within a certain date range, and to view those constituents on a map.


So we started by creating a Constituent list, and then used the Fundraiser filter to select only the constituents where he is the fundraiser. So far so good.


Then we went to the Any Gift filter and added a fund and a date range. Now the list times out. We see the little green circles for a few minutes, and then an error message that we should try again later.



I checked the Blackbaud Status page, but it looks like all relevant systems are operational.


We found that if we also added a tag filter (say, for "at-risk" donors), it works properly, probably because it's dealing with a much smaller data set. But that doesn't really solve our problem, because he wants to see all constituents.


Is anyone else having trouble when they add Gift filters to a Constituent list? Our database is large, but not that large - I'm sure there are many BB customers with more gift and constituent records.

I think the issue is probably what you're implying, which is that the data set is too large. It happens, but it might be worthwhile to try to create a query in the database side, and create the list from the query, but that probably would not be too helpful as you can only use static queries there. I don't know if you are having the same using a gift list, or if the filters you want to use are even there. It sounds like a dumb problem to have, however I'm not sure if there is a limit on how large a list you can pull from NXT. If there is a certain number of records before there is a timeout, they should let us know. Otherwise, it sounds like a database dynamic query will solve the issue without the timeouts. I know that may not be ideal for the fundraiser if they aren't familiar with DB view, but if that is what he wants, this will get them the data they need.

Blake Moody

Ben, I don't think that is the expected behavior for what seems to be a not very complex list. Can you reach out to our support team to make sure we can troubleshoot your timeout?


Would love for our team to be able to walk through troubleshooting and figure out if we have something we can fix for you.

Ben Regier

I had a chat session with Blackbaud support. My technician was not able to determine what was going wrong, and was not able to duplicate the problem in his environment (which may not be surprising if the problem is in fact linked to the size of the database). He said he was going to take the issue to the internal team. If I hear back from them, I'll update this thread. However, in my tests to try to find ways around this, I have found out a few other things.


The first is that if I select a less popular fund, the list populates as expected. This isn't too surprising if the amount of data is what's causing the problem, but it's worth noting.


The second is more surprising (to me). If I select the large fund as the only filter, I get a list. If I then add a date filter, it times out. So even without adding the fundraiser filter - with only the fund and gift date filters in place - I can't get a list. Even if I set the date filter to only return results from last week.


This surprises me because I would assume that gift dates and fund ids are stored in the same table in our underlying database (or at least in closely related tables). I can imagine that trying to combine a Constituent filter (Fundraiser) with a Gift filter (Fund) could cause problems because it would mean joining some very large tables. But if Fund and Gift Date are both related to gifts, it seems like it shouldn't be too complex of a query. But maybe my guesses as to how the database is structured are way off.

Sara Ford

Hi Ben -

I just came across this post, and I'm curious if you ever got an answer from Support on it. We have very similar problems across the whole NXT platform, and wondering if there were any helpful recommendations you were offered. Thanks in advance!

Ben Regier

Hi @Sara Ford - I actually still have an open ticket with Blackbaud support about this. I opened it in Feb, 2021. They confirmed the issue and said they would work to find a fix, but said they could not provide an estimated timeline for when that fix would be ready. It sounded like it might be a non-trivial thing.

I checked in with them in April, but they were still working on it. I haven't checked in since - maybe I should do that. I assume since the ticket is still open that someone still has it on their to-do list.

We can get the data we need using database view queries, but it's not ideal as we are trying to encourage our staff to move to web view when possible.

I'd suggest opening a support ticket. You say you're experiencing this across the whole NXT platform, which makes me wonder if it's a different problem than what we are experiencing. Even if it's the same problem, having another open ticket might get more people working to fix it!

Sara Ford

Oh interesting! I was hoping they gave you some great solution I could borrow from. I've taken this to Support in the past, and they think it's our database size (we have just shy of 500K records), as well as all of our table entries. They've encouraged me to go through the tables with lots of entries and figure out what is expendable.

The worst is trying to create a new Constituent List, because it's attempting to load all the constituents and any potential table entries associated with them. I struggle to understand how larger organizations can even use NXT if this really is the cause. We're in the same boat as far as encouraging staff to use web view, and this problem is not making things easier.

I do have a massive amount of table entries in our Ratings table, which I'm in the process of globally deleting (they're super old). If I find that this has a drastic effect on the speed with which constituent lists load, I can follow up with you and let you know. Maybe this could help you as well.