Filtering donors who give outside their area of residence

Aaron Tabak

I work for a statewide organization, and most of our mailings are broken down into separate lists by geographic region - Preferred County tends to be the main criteria for this. Donations are assigned fund names that are usually the county where the donor resides.



However, we do have some donors who regularly (or exclusively) give outside the county or region where they reside. These donors aren't consistently pulled on the right mailing lists, and I'd like to change that.



I see several options for changing this, including adding the "Area" category to address records (we haven't used it consistently, but it can label someone as a donor for a different region than where they reside), or adding a special attribute to note donors who give outside their home county.

 

The tough part is identifying all the donors in question. I've put together queries to show a donor's preferred county and the fund of their last gift, but without manually checking records, that doesn't tell me whether the gift outside the area was an exception (ie, in honor/memory of an acquaintance in another county), whether the donor simply moved within the state since his/her last gift, or whether there's an actual pattern.



Has anybody dealt with a similar situation? How have you identified these exceptions, and how have you tagged them to aid in the process?

Jen Claudy

We don't do anything like this, but if I were you, I would use a set of records to test your different options (Preferred Address Region, Constituent Attribute, Address Attribute, or even a field you aren't already using on Bio 2) and make sure that whatever you chose will work.



Use Global Change or Import to copy the Preferred Address County on all records to whatever field you have chosen.  Then start looking for anomalies.  If you know MS Access, you can export data to there and use Access queries, which work a bit differently, to find those that need to be changed.  Within RE, I would use a Query looking at all records in County A, and list all of their Gift Funds.  Sort by Fund and then your Region Tag.  This should show you donors who consistently give to a county they aren't living in.  If you have your Tribute Gifts marked, you can either exclude those from the Query, or show that field so you can spot them easily.  If you screen your database for NCOA (BB's AddressFinder or from another vendor), you can get current county names and then look at who may have moved, where the County and Region fields no longer match.



You're going to reach a point where you have to do some manual checking, I think.  But if you document your process and get everyone who does data entry to keep that field up-to-date, you should be okay over time.  That might be a benefit for an Attribute (Constituent or Address), because you can include a Date and Comment...tracking when the tag was last cha



Hope this makes sense, couldn't sleep but I'm probably not completely coherent...