Pulling Last Year's Event Sponsors

Tamsin Van Hoozer

Trying to find the best way to ‘tag’ event donors so that when we pull a list for the following year's solicitations, we don't get a long list of duplicates. Do I use Solicit Codes? Constituent Codes? We want to be able to pull these the same way every year. Please help!

Rebecca Entwisle

@Tamsin Van Hoozer There are a lot of ways to do this, some better than others. But getting duplicates in your lists may be the result of not how the records are tagged, but how you are pulling your solicitation lists.

As to tagging - I would not recommend using Solicit Codes. They are best suited to track the constituent's preferences for contact . (No email. No solicitation. Year-end appeal only. etc.) I would worry about cluttering up your Constituent Codes if you used them. If you created a new code each year, then you might end up with a lot of them, and find building queries with them tedious. You could define a Constituent Attribute (Something like “Event Sponsor” and then have the associated value be the name of the event, and the date reflect the year they sponsored.) That would allow you to track repeat sponsorships, which might be useful.

But, is there anything about the gift that the sponsor gives that allows you to identify it as a sponsorship? (Perhaps a Gift Subtype, or some other way you record this.) If so, then you do not need to tag your sponsors at all. You can build a Constituent query, that pulls anyone with a gift with the right properties.

What about duplicates? However you track your sponsors, and thus build a query to identify them, I strongly suggest you use Export (or Mail which is basically a specialized Export) to actually export the data for your mailing. You specify the query, and then the fields you want to export for each of the constituents in the query. You will get exactly those constituents who meet the parameters of the query, once each. You'll have some options to remove people who have no address, who are coded with a solicit code indicating they don't want contact, AND, if you have couples in your list, you'll be able to export only once for the both of them.

If you have access to Blackbaud's training materials, there is a useful on-demand course on Mail "Raiser’s Edge®: Basics of Mail" on BlackbaudU.