Donor Anniversary

Question

I want to create a query that reflect donor month any year.

For example, we send donorversary cards out every month for the donors anniversary gift. I wast to just show first gifts made in the month of April. But I can only create a query that reflects all gifts within the operator BETWEEN criteria. This shows gifts for all months.

Anyone have a work around?

Alex Wong · Answer

As Faith said, directly using Query is not going to give you the filtering you want.

depending on how much you want to manually do, there are a few options:

* Faith methods definitely doable here, so those are 2 options, but does require quite a bit more manual work (esp the Membership option)
* Query all constituent that is a donor (having a first gift date)* output first gift date and other relevant data
* in excel, you can use the MONTH formula to get the month of donation, and then filter using that new column
* if you want to learn a little, Power Query can be created within Excel that does the transformation and filtering for you, such that you can automate many of the manual steps mentioned above with a click or 2.

* Power Automate to automate everything* Dan's link is similar, but it was 2022, a lot has changed since, so there is better way to do this and make it completely automated.
* This method does have some learning curve, more so than learning Power Query in excel
* if you are interested, you can visit the getting started guide on developer.blackbaud.com
* There are also consultants out there that will create the automation for you/your org, myself included, you can email me at alex.wong@ffxconsulting.co if you are interested to learn more.

Elizabeth Johnson · Answer

You are in great hands with @Faith Murray's response.

If anyone wants to build some automation around this I would recommend you check out @Dan Snyder Power Automate flow.

Faith Murray · Answer

Yes, Blackbaud only allows fuzzy date criteria (this month any year) on specific fields like the birthdate field, but not on First Gift date or Custom Field dates. The main workaround I could think of would be to create an "OR" criteria, such as

* (First gift date between 04-01-2025 and 04-30-2025
* OR First gift date between 04-01-2024 and 04-30-2024
* OR First gift date between 04-01-2023 and 04-30-2023…  etc.)

This would be workable as long as you're not trying to go past 20 years of history with your donorversaries.

Another workaround would be to look at using Memberships to track dates. You could, conceivably, create a membership structure where their "membership" expires a year after their original gift. Each time you print donorversary cards, you could bulk renew the memberships until the following year.