Calculating "yahrzeits"" in Raiser's Edge

Alexis Goldstein

Hi! Our organization is transition to RE NXT now. Previously we used a product that calculates yahrzeits - the Hebrew anniversary date of someone's death - which is important because we send out reminders to family members and often receive donations around the anniversary. Does anyone have experience working with yahrzeits in Raiser's Edge?

Daniel Bayer

Not gonna lie, seeing this post gave me a bit of PTSD from when I had to figure out a system for doing this. I'm not sure that it's the best way, but this is what I came up with:

First, make sure to enter deceased dates where you have them. Next, figure out what the Hebrew date for the Yahrzeit is. Then we created an Attribute for Yahrzeit Date and put the Hebrew Yahrzeit date as text in the Description field. Finally, I created a query to be run every month based on the deceased date with an output of the Yahrzeit Date attribute, from which we would create a monthly plan/schedule for reaching out. If you're not able to fill in the western deceased date, then just set up the query to search for whatever Hebrew month in the Attribute Description.

It's a bit involved, but there's no real way to EASILY do this in RE. We were able to make it work. Happy to talk about it with you further if you want over direct messages.

Alexis Goldstein

Thanks so much; this is very helpful! We are transitioning our data over to RE now, so it's helpful to know if/how we can make the yahrzeits piece work.

Vered Siegel

Can I add to this? I really liked having separate attributes for day, Hebrew month, Hebrew year. That way you can pull a Query for Yahrzeits by month or year as needed for newsletters, and you can still Export all three as needed, together or separately. When I needed to I'd just concatenate all three fields from Excel. This also let you (sort of) account for what happened when someone had a Yahrzeit date in Adar II, which is easy to lose track of.

Art Bryman

Blackbaud does offer a Yahrzeit calculator macro for sale. It's been a few years since I used it, but back then this was a DB-view macro only. It would take the date in the "Deceased date" field, calculate the Yahrzeit date, and add it as an attribute. It also popped up a window, with several fields such as Burial Location, Burial Date, Clergy, and a field that pulled from a list of relationships. It was cumbersome, but it did work, and was faster than looking up the date in an online translator. I