Querying and Exporting Fund Relationships

Kim Berry

We need to send thank you letters from scholarship recipients to the fund contacts. All the contacts have been entered in fund relationships - how do I query on funds with contacts (for the moment only scholarships have fund contacts entered) and then export a list showing the contact information for the individual and organizational relationships associated with each fund so that I can do a mail merge? Or is it something I should do directly from Mail? Either way, not sure how to do fund query yet pull constituent information into the merge file.



I saw something about a Fund Relationship Export Plug-in; is that something I need to use?  Have not really done m(any) fund queries and I can only export constituent queries, right? Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction.

Alan French

I've not actually tried this as we don't currently have any fund relationships set up, but I would have approached this task from the other angle: rather than doing a fund query/export for those that have an individual or organisation relationship, could you instead do a constituent query to find constituents who have a fund relationship? Then you can use the query in a constituent export to get the consttiuent's contact info.



You can export any sort of query, but only certain types of query can be used with each type of export. A constituent export can use a constituent, individual, or organisation query; fund exports have to use fund queries; gift exports can use gift, constituent, individual, or organisation queries etc.

Gina Gerhard

Kim - We in the community foundation field deal with this issue often as we deal heavily in funds and fund relationships.



Blackbaud's 'solution' of the Fund Relationship Export Plug-in we found to be useless for our needs -- the idea behind it was fine but it was totally underpowered and can't do anything but export out the preferred address - it didn't have any address processing functions so you couldn't even pull out a seasonal address.  We tried to explain to Blackbaud why it was useless but they sort of didn't get it.  To me, that 'solution' was under-thought and we've never used it.



So what I think you end up doing is trying to get out what you can with constituent and/or fund exports, and then having to do massaging.  

• In constituent export, you can get to relationship, fund, and there's a filter to 'Select funds'.  But unfortunately this filter only lets you specify individual funds and start/end date.  So this filter is totally not useful.  
• What you really want here is the ability to specify funds of specific types or which specific attributes.  But you can't. So what you end up doing is having to export out ALL the funds. We have many constituents have have many relationships to many funds, so we end up having to export everything and then get rid of the funds we don't want.
• There there's a sub-category called Relationship Fund Record where you can export out more data about the fund.

So I think the main problem here is the lack of a useful filter.  If you have simpler fund relationships, this might be less of a problem.



We've also ended up exporting out both fund and constituent information and used VLOOKUP to match up the data.



There is an IdeaBank solution out there for voting:  "Make relationship preferred address available when doing a fund export": http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3611900-make-relationship-preferred-address-available-when

• Suggested comment to enter:  'Current fund relationship plug-in that Blackbaud provides is not adequate for doing a robust mailing. Need true enhancement of fund relationship functionality within export'.

 

Kim Berry

Alan French:

I've not actually tried this as we don't currently have any fund relationships set up, but I would have approached this task from the other angle: rather than doing a fund query/export for those that have an individual or organisation relationship, could you instead do a constituent query to find constituents who have a fund relationship? Then you can use the query in a constituent export to get the consttiuent's contact info.



You can export any sort of query, but only certain types of query can be used with each type of export. A constituent export can use a constituent, individual, or organisation query; fund exports have to use fund queries; gift exports can use gift, constituent, individual, or organisation queries etc.

Alan - that works; thanks! Appreciate you pointing me in the right direction.

Kim Berry

Gina Gerhard:

Kim - We in the community foundation field deal with this issue often as we deal heavily in funds and fund relationships.



Blackbaud's 'solution' of the Fund Relationship Export Plug-in we found to be useless for our needs -- the idea behind it was fine but it was totally underpowered and can't do anything but export out the preferred address - it didn't have any address processing functions so you couldn't even pull out a seasonal address.  We tried to explain to Blackbaud why it was useless but they sort of didn't get it.  To me, that 'solution' was under-thought and we've never used it.



So what I think you end up doing is trying to get out what you can with constituent and/or fund exports, and then having to do massaging.  

• In constituent export, you can get to relationship, fund, and there's a filter to 'Select funds'.  But unfortunately this filter only lets you specify individual funds and start/end date.  So this filter is totally not useful.  
• What you really want here is the ability to specify funds of specific types or which specific attributes.  But you can't. So what you end up doing is having to export out ALL the funds. We have many constituents have have many relationships to many funds, so we end up having to export everything and then get rid of the funds we don't want.
• There there's a sub-category called Relationship Fund Record where you can export out more data about the fund.

So I think the main problem here is the lack of a useful filter.  If you have simpler fund relationships, this might be less of a problem.



We've also ended up exporting out both fund and constituent information and used VLOOKUP to match up the data.



There is an IdeaBank solution out there for voting:  "Make relationship preferred address available when doing a fund export": http://rediscovery.uservoice.com/forums/137015-raiser-s-edge-discovery-topics/suggestions/3611900-make-relationship-preferred-address-available-when

• Suggested comment to enter:  'Current fund relationship plug-in that Blackbaud provides is not adequate for doing a robust mailing. Need true enhancement of fund relationship functionality within export'.

 

 

Gina - thanks for the detailed response. I had found the plug-in but couldn't seem to make it work.  For the time being, we've only entered our scholarship contacts so shouldn't have to do too much filtering.  Appreciate your feedback and will look into following up on the IdeaBank (which is also new to me ...)

Kylea Johnson

Three years later and this post is still helpful! Thought I was crazy but alas, it's sad I can't get this info!