BBCRM Marketing Efforts Refresh Producing Unpredictable Results

Vikki Hamilton

Hello PAG Members,

 

I am writing to inquire if those using marketing efforts have run into the problem described below?

 

Description of bug:

When a marketing effort is activated for a mailing, all of these underlying queries are refreshed.  By chance we have discovered that when the same query is run by the system simultaneously by one or more users for multiple marketing efforts, the results returned are unpredictable.  While the bug has relatively low likelihood of occurrence, if triggered, there is a potential of very high risk to data quality and constituent dissatisfaction, both in mailings not initiating for intended recipients and exclusions being missed.  

 

Next steps:

A case has been submitted to Blackbaud for review, and they have replicated the issue.  However, they are indicating that there won't be an immediate fix for this. We feel that part of the issue is that we may be the only client that discovered this issue, yet it may be affecting other clients that aren't yet aware that it is.

 

If you haven't yet, and have multiple users utilizing the same query and possibly refreshing simultaneously, you may want to investigate this further for your own shop. And, if you do indeed discover this problem, it would be very helpful if you could also report this problem to Blackbaud. We would be very interested to hear from others! I have copied Angie Lafferty on this email, who leads the team that runs many of our complex marketing efforts.

 

Thanks,

--Vikki

Derek Clark

We had not experienced this but I wanted to give it a try with our team. We ran through 3 different tests and our calculations came out as predicted when run at the same time. We are on 4.0 sp 11.


Derek

University of Georgia