Pulling Queries of Removed

Alexandra Logan

Hello!


My name is Alexandra and I'm an Administrative Assistant in a Alumnae & Foundation department that operates out of a high school. My department does a lot of mass mailings to both our school and alumnae communities. One of my responsibilities is cleaning and updating constituent mailing addresses whenever we get mail returned back to us. 


Our department has been using Raisers Edge 7 for almost 20 years, and there's been lots of turnover within that time. Our current team has learned to adapt how we remove constituent information based on the mistakes previous users have done. We're now in a spot where we want to know how much progress we're making and see where we still need to make changes.

My question: Is there a way to pull a query that can tell me how many constituents have had their addresses removed over a certain period of time?


I don't think a query of this kind has ever been pulled before in our database and I'm not entirely sure how to set up the criteria properly.


Any advice is welcome!

Austen Brown

Hi Alex Logan‍ - Using a "Constituent" query you can pull together constituents using the the fields available for "Addresses".  As I do not know your org's process for marking/editing incorrect addresses, can you be more specific on how "constituents have had their addresses removed"?

Alexandra Logan

Okay, so our process for when we get returned mail from our post office:


1. We identify the constituent(s) that the address belongs to

2. We delete the address from their constituent file completely so that it can't be picked up in the next query pull for the mailout (If it's a constituent that we want to keep that relationship open, we'll include their last known address in that Note

3. Mark the constituent as "No Valid Address"

4. Leave a Note in their file indicating that we had received returned mail from that address (whether they've moved and haven't updated us with their new address or if the constituent has died)


Ideally what I would like to try and do is be able to pull a query that's something like "Constituents that have had their Addresses removed from 2018-2019". I'm not sure if I can get that specific. I did see something in the Criteria tab about being able to pull something like "Last Updated."


I personally have been working in RE7 for 3 years and only took a handful of the online classes. Everything I've learned has been by trial and error. 

Dariel Dixon 2

I don't think you can pull this data on deleted items.  Since the record no longer exists, I don't think you can get this data natively.  You can pull information on existing records as far as date created and date last changed.


From the way you describe your process, it sounds like you only keep one address per constituent.  Do you not keep any historical address information?  I find that data to be invaluable when doing research on records.

Alan French

If you use a specific note type for those returned mail notes that you don't use for anything else, you could query on ones of those type that have been added between certain dates.