queries & exports for a mailing list

Audrey Katzman

RE merging queries: We are revising procedures to prepare our newsletter mailing list. In the past, this has been a cumbersome process involving a constituent query for individuals/couples and a relationship query for employees/primary contacts of organizations, followed by two exports into excel (constituent and relationship) followed by merging the two resulting spreadsheets. then reviewing 3,000 records to find and delete duplicates. Ugh. Can someone suggest options to streamline this process? We only want to send to primary contacts of organizations. However, some primary contacts have made donations or attended events, so they have their own constituent records. Thank you in advance.

Joe Moretti

@Audrey Katzman I suggest to use RE Mail (Quick Letters) and if you have several queries you use to pull the info, use the Segment portion of the RE MAIL (but the queries must be the same type). The segment will remove any duplicates that are in the other segments below each one (so have a heirachy of queries).

In the Org Address tab, you can choose which type of ORG Contact you want (Always good to have types of Org Contact). You can also choose if the contact has an Individual record as well to send to the IND Address or the Org Address or both.

Using RE Mail eliminates duplicates and unnecessary clean-up. It is the perfect way to do mailings as opposed to using multiple queries, then exporing each, the de-duplicating, etc. RE MAIL is the way to go as long and it is best to use the segment, where all your different queries can go (but like I said they MUST be all the same such and be a Constituent Query.

Audrey Katzman

@Audrey KatzmanThank you VERY MUCH for providing the information and screen shots. I really appreciate it. I'll try your suggestions today!

Christine Robertson

@Audrey Katzman I totally agree with @Joe Moretti - Quick Letters and segmentation are so useful for this type of work. I would also work with Query List to combine Queries on the front end - I like it so much better than merging Queries and it can really help when you have multiple groups to combine.