Constituent-based queries and Contact/Relationship records

Daniel Noga 2 · October 2015

Hello everyone,

I am preparing a mailing list with criteria that may require some extra steps. I need all donors over a certain amount, Board members and Trustees (identified with Constituent Codes), people who have given to a certain campaign, and then Key Dinner Contacts--this last one is the one I need some help with. These contacts are typically stored in Relationship records, and so they may or may not have Constituent records at all. So the question becomes: Can a single Constituent Query group all of these together correctly? It looks like I can easily set the query Criteria to pull these Contacts, but since it is a Constituent query, I am concerned that this may only pull people who have their own Constituent records, and may leave out the Contacts who don't. Does anybody know if that is the case?

JoAnn Strommen · October 2015

You should be able to query on the relationships you need, there are knowledgebase solutions that describe process for querying on relationships.

I don't have much experience pulling exactly what you need but what I would do is query those key dinner contacts in a separate query to see that the results are what you expect. If so, you can merge the queries for your mailing list or add the criteria to your other query.

Michelle Kolak · October 2015

Have you used attributes on the relationship records? I tried this and it works well. This way, if you have several at an org, you can create a relationship query and export and get every contact on the org record that has the attribute, even if they are embedded. The beauty of the relationship export is that the fields are similar to the constituent export, so it makes it really easy to merge the files in excel. Just be sure to export the individual constituent ID in the relationship export so that you can de-dupe later.

Daniel Noga 2 · October 2015

Thanks, JoAnn and Michelle, for your thoughts.

I am usually reluctant to merge lists from different Excel files--too many bad experiences with things going wrong. But if the fields line up nicely, it might be a better option.

Compounding the issue is the fact that for many of our big Dinner donors, we don't have anyone marked with a Dinner-specific Contact Type; we have one in our tables, but it has not been applied as consistently as it should. For these, I would need to pull all of the "Main" Contacts. I want to avoid anything that will use Main Contact as a Criteria, as it might then pull many irrelevant records along with the ones we want. Attributes may be a good way around this, as there are good reasons that some people who really are Dinner-related Contacts should not necessarily have that as their main identifying Contact type.

Any time I can get everything I need into one Query, though, I am a happy camper. I can almost always work out the rest of the details in Export.

JoAnn Strommen · October 2015

Daniel, just to clarify my response - my reference to "merging" is to merge the queries in RE. Yes, one query to export is much cleaner than exporting and merging several excel files.

Daniel Noga 2 · October 2015

JoAnn Strommen:

Daniel, just to clarify my response - my reference to "merging" is to merge the queries in RE. Yes, one query to export is much cleaner than exporting and merging several excel files.

Oh, no worries JoAnn. I think Michelle's post mentioned merging Excel files and that's what I was referring to. Thank you for the clarification, though! I had forgotten about merged Queries as well, and those are very useful.

Constituent-based queries and Contact/Relationship records

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