Globally Add Appeal

Adam Eggert

What is the easiest way to globally add an appeal sent to records?  I have an excel spreadsheet of names who have received the mailing.  Most of them are in our system, but not all since they are not all donors. 


Thanks,


Adam Eggert

Horizon Health Foundation

Alan French

To globally add an appeal to constituent records, you'll need to create a query containing the relevant constituents. Does your spreadsheet contain ID numbers for those who are existing constituents? That would be the easiest thing to use for your query criteria, but if you haven't got IDs you could use something else like email address that would (in most cases) uniquely identify the right record.

Marybeth Jewhurst

You would need a query of those constituents for whom you wish to add the appeal. Then it is a global function under Admin - Globally add records. This is a very simple function unless I am not understanding your question entirely. 

Adam Eggert

Yeah...I was thinking that was the only way.  Unfortunately with this particular list I don't have ID Numbers or email addresses, only name, addressee, address. 

Karen Hartt

You can create a specific record query and do the global add from that. I don't use this type of query for more than 100 records at a time, but it does work.

Adam Eggert

Karen,


How would I import the names from the spreadsheet to the specific record query?

John Heizer

If you don't have anything in the spreadsheet that will tie each row to a specific record in RE then, unfortunately, you're stuck looking up each record in RE one-by-one.  While you have that record open in RE you might as well manually add the data to their Appeal tab instead of trying to do an Import or Global Add as an additional step.


Third-party products like ImportOmatic or Importacular have methods of loosely identifying possible matches between your spreadsheet and RE based on names, but they must be purchased separately and you must still manually confirm matches where there are multiple John Smiths in your database (or it's not the right John Smith).

Aaron Rothberg

Hi Adam-


With only a list of names and addresses you're not going to be able to add appeals to those records without first matching them up to Constituent Ids in your database. The easiest way (and certainly not the most comprehensive) is to export all constituents with their name and address to Excel and within Excel, build a unique key using those fields. For example


First Name: Mary

Last Name: Smith

Address: 101 Main Street, Boston, MA, 01810

Unique key: MarySmith101MainStreetBostonMA01810


Do the same thing in the list that was provided to you on a different tab in the same Excel workbook and use VLOOKUP to find your matches between unique keys. The short coming of this approach is that records will not match despite being the same person if anything in your list does not exactly match what's in your database (e.g., "Street" verusus "ST", "Mary" versus "Marilyn"). However, if you originally exported this list and you are being given back the same list with no edits, you should see almost, if not exactly, a 100% match.


The lesson which you've no doubt discovered by now is to never provide a list to anyone without Constituent Ids and require those same Ids be intact when you are given the list back.

Karen Hartt

Adam,

You can't import records to a Specific Record Query - it is a one of type of query and you would have to build from the constituent name. Like I said, it won't be fast.

Ann Johnson

@Alan French I am in the process of globally adding appeals for a big mailing that went out. Is it always slow when updating thousands of records?

Patricia Lewis

@Adam Eggert Adam, I do this often for various mailing and phonathon. I use Import to assign the appeal to the constituent. My file layout is

ConsID

AppealID

Date

I hope this helps.

Alan French

@Ann Johnson it can be, I usually find it's somewhere around 600-1000 records per minute depending on what I'm globally adding/importing, so it can take a couple of hours for our larger mailings. If I'm working from home over the VPN, it takes about 5 times as long as when I'm in the office! To get around this we have an extra PC set up under one of the desks in the office that we can log in to remotely when we need to run large imports from home.