Pulling Lists for Annual Fund Mailing

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Kerry Ayres-Smith
Kerry Ayres-Smith
Eighth Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic 5 Likes
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Hey all,


My organization is already gearing up for FY 18 (ahhh!) and working on pulling our lists for Annual Fund 18 Mailing #1 (double ahhh!). This is my first year pulling these lists, so I wanted to ask for advice...


I need to do a LYBUNT and a SYBUNT, both with gift amounts and certain groups removed, and with the standard address block. Would this best be achieved by building a query and then exporting it and doing manual clean up, or should I build a query and then export it, or should I use one of the canned reports?


Thanks in advance for your suggestions and good luck to all finishing up their fiscal year!


Kerry
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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen Community All-Star
    Ancient Membership 2,500 Likes 2500 Comments Photogenic
    Whether or not the LYBUNT/SYBUNT reports pull what you need depends on if you are strictly looking at a calendar year.  For our 2017 annual campaign we have staff and board gifts received in  2016 and will still be receiving pledge payments in 2018 so those reports don't work for us.  If all your gifts fall neatly in the year, the reports would be a great place to start in clicking at bottom left to create an output query.


    Otherwise IMO you should create a query (group) of records fitting your financial criteria.  Take that query to Export function and there add in your address block, saluations, pulling the gift amounts etc. After exporting it to excel do any manual clean up. 


    As you said you haven't done this before, when you export be sure to include the Constituent ID field. You may not need it but it's best to pull in case you do. You can use it to do global adds of appeals, packages etc. If your original query has any significant amount of clean up this is the best tracking of what RE records you use for your mailing.
  • Katherine Mannion
    Katherine Mannion
    Ancient Membership 25 Likes 10 Comments Photogenic
    Another good option is to use Mail (Quick Letters) to build your list.  You can use the Segment tab to build the hierarchy based on your queries, and this will also let you add the Appeal and Package to the records.  The hierarchy will help you eliminate duplicates and cut down on the amount of manual manipulation you have to do.

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