Globally Add Appeal

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Adam Eggert
Adam Eggert ✭
Eighth Anniversary Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
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
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Comments

  • Marybeth Jewhurst
    Marybeth Jewhurst ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1
    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
    Adam Eggert ✭
    Eighth Anniversary Facilitator 1
    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
    Karen Hartt ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    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
    Adam Eggert ✭
    Eighth Anniversary Facilitator 1
    Karen,


    How would I import the names from the spreadsheet to the specific record query?
  • John Heizer
    John Heizer ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 3 Photogenic
    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
    Aaron Rothberg ✭
    Eighth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    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
    Karen Hartt ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    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
    Ann Johnson ✭
    Third Anniversary Name Dropper First Reply

    @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
    Patricia Lewis ✭
    Ninth Anniversary First Reply

    @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

    ConsIDAppealIDDate

    I hope this helps.

  • Alan French
    Alan French ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @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.

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