Handling households in gift queries

Keri Rainsberger:

We are trying to create a gift query that pulls at a gift level but only includes head of household. This would be similar to what you can do using the household handling checkboxes on the constituent export, but these are not available for a gift export. Attempts to recreate a similar filter within the gift query we will use to filter the export have been unsuccessful (including the non-head information on gifts, and missing some of our heads of household). 

Query is a grouping tool - Export/Report are reporting tools. Often you have to use query to do the first set of filtering but further filter in Export or reports - HOH is one of those times. I do not think that I have any secret to using query to filter in this way. Anytime I tried I failed.

Can you why you can not use your query in export or reports to accomplish your task?

JoAnn Strommen:

I'm a bit confused on what you are trying to pull unsuccessfuly.  It almost sounds like you want only gifts for records marked HOH.  HOH only is applicable when yoou have spousal relationships.  Are you saying you don't want gifts pulled that were made by the non-HOH or by 'single/spouse is not-constituent' records.  Don't know that you can exclude second group. 

It would be helpful to me if you could clarify exactly what you are trying to query/export.

I agree it would help to have some clarification on what group of people and gifts you want. If you simply want to exclude gifts from constituents who have a spouse that is marked HOH, the easiest way I can think of to get it is to use the Quick Letters mailing function with "Mail to the constituents marked 'Head of Household'" selected and the "Create output query" checkbox marked. Then you could select that output query in a report, like the Gift Detail and Summary report. If you really do need a gift query for a specific reason, you could have that report create a gift output query. I hope that helps!

Keri Rainsberger:

Will try to clarify a bit more: we need a gift level file as we are sending this to our direct marketing vendor to further process and select mail recipients based on gift patterns.  However, we do not want multiple mailings sent to the same household so where we have two spouses in our donor database, we would like to have only the HOH info pulled for the constituent info attached to the individual gifts (ideally we could use soft credits to pull all of the household's giving under the HOH).  We will then use an export to pull the data once we have narrowed down the gift records we want to include.

Export.

I do not recommend anyone ever send a file to anyone directly from query. The query output screen is not designed to be a report or file for export.

My question for you though is, do you want a gift file (gift export) or donor file (constituent export). If they are basing this on giving patters they may need the gift file and a gift export does not have HOH processing.

Maybe you are getting confused with soft credit options - if a donor gives and their spouse is soft credited, the only way both the donor and the spouse show up in your gift query is if you select Soft credit to both. What soft credit options did you use?

If a consituent file is really what you need, go to Export (in the left navigation) and create a your constituent export. Use the include button and include the query you created. If it is a constituent query, then use the HOH processing and include/exclude checkboxes as appropriate - then select what fields (columns) you want included in your file to the vendor.