Export not "counting" a relationship record if the Date To field is blank.

Lindsay Schuiteman · September 2020

Our organization is a faith-based non-profit, so we have many donors that are churches. We track church pastors via relationship records. We use the relationship record to capture when a pastor began ministering at a church (Date From field) and when the pastor left the church or retired (Date To field). Obviously, if a pastor is still active at a church, the Date To field remains blank; the Date To field remains so until the pastor's retirement or resignation.

Recently, we wanted to pull an export of all current pastors from a particular group of churches for a calling campaign. Unfortunately, Export did not recognize a blank Date To field on relationships, neither when asking for ascending nor descending order. For example, let's say there are two men on a church record marked pastor. One of them has a filled in Date To field because he retired. The new pastor's Date To field is blank. If the Export's Individual Relations criteria is 1 with an order of ascending, the pastor with a blank Date To field should populate, but it does not. Trying it the opposite way, descending, produces the same results. So the issue, I thought, was that Export does not recognize or "count" a relationship record if the Date To field is blank.

But the issue is actually more nuanced than this! Let's say a church has only one pastor relationship record, and that pastor's Date To field is blank. The Export will recognize or "count" that record! So to break it down simply, Export does not recognize or "count" a relationship record if the Date To field is blank AND there is another relationship record of the same type with a non-blank Date To field.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Am I missing something obvious? How can I work around it? Or, is this an error that should reported to Blackbaud? Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen · September 2020

I sympathize and feel your frustration. Just this month gone through the same type of thing with trying to export current solicitor/fundraiser. Finally learned to get one with the open 'date to' field had to export at least two solicitors and then delete the unwanted data. Yes, seems quite odd.

I did get the export to work for our researcher. Took several tries of date from vs. date to vs date added / asc vs. decs. Think what finally worked for us was date from, descending.

I would have to check with our researcher to see if it did not pull when there is just one solicitor on the record. I looks like it pulls just one when I look at the preview. (Large data export and I can't tie up RE right now to export it myself.)

Larry Wheeler · September 2020

I have had trouble with the From and To Date fields in the past.

I pull by the relationship (Contact Point Officer, Contact Point Secondary, and others) along with the "For this organization, this individual is a(n):" checkboxes to easily exclude those no longer a contact for the org. I verify I have the correct information by exporting the columns needed for verification and then delete the columns from the csv.

One other option is to put a TO DATE of something like 1/1/3030 on the current pastors. A date which is recognizable as a "filler" TO DATE.

I hope you are able to solve your issue with a work-around. Good luck

John Heizer · September 2020

This is a known problem with RE. Unfortunately RE Export first looks at the number of records you want (1) THEN looks at sorting them. Because you asked for one record it first grabs that one record (seemingly randomly, but probably ordered by relationship record number) then sorts that one record in the order you want. I've heard that if you select two records to be output that the sort will work correctly for 2+ records, but haven't tested it myself.

Export not "counting" a relationship record if the Date To field is blank.

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