Email List Size for Reporting (Over Time)

Jen Claudy

For my department's reports, I have to show the size of our email list and how much it has grown over time. This is problematic for 2 reasons.



First, when you click [Manage Lists] in OLX and look at the number of Recipients (currently 13061) and then compare that number to the reported Recipients of a message just sent to that list (last Thu 4/16 a message was sent and it says 11571 Recipients), they don't match. My staff is asking me how our list grew by about 1600 from the message sent at the end of Feb to the [Manage Lists] total showing now, when we've only entered a handful of new email addresses.



If I push the data to RE Appeals, and query who has that Appeal tag, the numbers here don't match, either. I just now clicked [Add this data to RE] for the 4/16 message. It said the system would add the data to 11571 records. 10 seconds later, I get a pop-up that says "The appeal was successfully added to 12198 records."



I'm not even sure which number to use on my report. At present, I've gone back and pulled the Recipients number from OLX for each message. However, if someone else where to run the reports, they may instead choose to use the RE Appeal total "Total Number of Constituents (Assigned)" which is higher. In fact, since I can pull a query of all the OLX appeals with that total listed, that's what I'm probably going to do moving forward. Then I can get rid of my Excel spreadsheet where I've stored the Recipients total for each message.



Now that I'm typing this, I'm wondering if part of the problem is duplicates. I have two emails in the database, and both appear on the list, so I appear twice in the query after pushing the data over. But after digging into that, there are ~178 on the list twice, which isn't near the discrepancy of 627 between the 2 numbers.



Anyone else having similar problems?