RE can't export phone data for Contacts without mailing address. What's your workaround?

Eleonore Heinrichs

I need your help all you RE Pros! Please bear with me as I give particulars… You’re suggestions are very welcome.


Scenario 1: Online Organization (Const with No Valid Address) has contacts (non-Const) who would like to receive email only. In the Relationship Record for the Contact, we have email and phone information but no address. Because AddressLine1 = blank, we have left the “Send mail to this address” checked.


Scenario 2: Organization (Const with complete mailing Address) has freelancers who are contacts (non-Const) of the Org, but who do not receive physical mail at the Org’s Office. In the Relationship Record for the Contact, we have email, phone and a mailing address listed. But, since we should not send mail addressed to the contact, we have deselected “Send mail to this address.”


To get an email list, I use Address Processing in an Export (since Qck Ltr does not have email as an option of fields to include). While I ensure that the export includes Const. with No Valid Address, it seems that I am unable to get the email information for contacts in either of the scenarios. When I connected with the folks at Blackbaud about this (what I call glitch) they simply confirmed that Address Processing will not pull the contacts in either of those scenarios.


BB suggested pulling that data out of Relationships (and filter by contacts) but not only am I unable to filter the results by Attributes (which we use a lot), it also calls for lots of tedious Excel maneuvering to get those columns into rows. My idea is (sadly) to populate with ‘dummy data’ such as “no address” in AddressLine1 and to leave “Send Mail to This Address” checked. I’ll have to do a lot of exclusions so that I don’t accidentally mail to ‘no address’ but that seems like the only way these ‘no address’ contacts will be included in email blasts. As most DB Admins would understand, I dread the idea of intentionally adding bad data.


I’m frustrated that BB doesn’t seem to appreciate that the update that they did for Constituent phones is also needed for Org Contacts. We can’t be the only RE Users that email Org Contacts who do not want postal mail. I wonder, how do you work around this glitch in RE’s Address Processing? Thanks for your help!!

Sandy Fiddis

How about if you use a Query (based on your existing query so that there are no repeating rows), with logic like this...

(Constituent, Address Processing, Phones, Do Not Contact? = NO

AND Constituent, Address Processing, Phones, Phone Type = Email 1, etc.)

(OR Relationship, Contact, Address, Phones, Do Not Contact? = NO

AND Relationship, Contact, Address, Phones, Phone Type = Email 1, etc.)


Then export the corresponding email addresses?

Jen Claudy

I tried to recreate your scenarios.  I got no data with Address Processing, but I got the data exported via Relationships > Contacts.  Can you switch where you're pulling the email address from?



 

Eleonore Heinrichs

Thanks for your responses Jen & Sandy. Yes, those are options, but they do not allow us to limit the results based on Contact Attributes. As I noted, we use these Attributes a lot to help identify exactly to which Org contacts we want to reach out. I thought about using the Contact Type: i.e. instead of "Event Contact" change to "Event Contact - Interest A", "Event Contact - Interest B", etc. But this does limit the contact to one interest...with the attributes I can have multiple interests. Alas, my 'dummy data' strategy seems to be working...but it sure is an ugly workaround.

Gina Gerhard

Eleonore Heinrichs:

Thanks for your responses Jen & Sandy. Yes, those are options, but they do not allow us to limit the results based on Contact Attributes. As I noted, we use these Attributes a lot to help identify exactly to which Org contacts we want to reach out. I thought about using the Contact Type: i.e. instead of "Event Contact" change to "Event Contact - Interest A", "Event Contact - Interest B", etc. But this does limit the contact to one interest...with the attributes I can have multiple interests. Alas, my 'dummy data' strategy seems to be working...but it sure is an ugly workaround.

In addition to what Jen shows above, you could also export the Contact/Attribute and then choose the attribute you're trying to get.

This will export out the import ID for those contacts with the attribute, and you can then sort your Excel sheet to choose only those contacts?