querying last gifts gifts of a particular type or fund?

John Demarce 2 · February 2016

My organization often uses the Last Gift field as a factor in determining appeal ask amounts, but we also record a lot of $0.00 gift-in-kind and event registration fees that obscure the amount that we're looking for. Is there a native way in RE to query for the last gift of a certain type or fund, rather than just the most recent transaction?

JoAnn Strommen · February 2016

Unless I'm missing something, there is an easy way to get last gift of a certain type or fund. Just add that criteria to your query. Using the criteria under Last Gift add Gift type equals or is one of/add specific fund. You could even narrow more by date to gifts in the past two years etc. Just choose all your criteria from the list under Last Gift.

Rachel Rosen · February 2016

JoAnn's asnwer is spot on. It would include a second piece of criteria; something like Fund ID = Annual, or Fund Description = Annual Fund, and so on. You might even want to consider an ASK operator query here, so you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel looking for last gifts within specific Campaigns, Funds and Appeals. We discuss this in our Query 2 class, but you can check out the Knowledgebase on the Blackbaud.com website in the meantime. Happy Querying!

Alan French · February 2016

I feel like I'm missing something, as I've always thought that Last Gift in query doesn't work like that. Unlike Last Gift in export, which will pull out the last gift of the type/fund etc. that you've specified regardless of whether or not it's the constituent's last gift of any description, whenever I've used this criteria in a query it only includes the constituent if it is actually their last gift that matches.

I've just tested it on a record with 2 gifts to different funds, A and B. "Last gift fund ID equals A" yields zero records, while "last gift fund ID equals B" yields one record because the gift to fund B was the last one added to the constituent record.

If I'm misunderstanding this then I'd love to know, as it would be really useful to be able to do these sorts of queries!

John Demarce 2 · February 2016

Alan's description is correct. Constituent queries using Last Gift with criteria only produce a result when the most recent transaction matches the criteria. If the most recent transaction doesn't match, they don't work their way back in time in a constituent's gift table to find the closest transaction that does match.

John Demarce 2 · February 2016

Rachel Rosen:

JoAnn's asnwer is spot on. It would include a second piece of criteria; something like Fund ID = Annual, or Fund Description = Annual Fund, and so on. You might even want to consider an ASK operator query here, so you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel looking for last gifts within specific Campaigns, Funds and Appeals. We discuss this in our Query 2 class, but you can check out the Knowledgebase on the Blackbaud.com website in the meantime. Happy Querying!

That is not the behavior I get. I get no result except where the most recent gift record matches the criteria.

Marie Stark · February 2016

I agree with Alan and John. I believe this can only be done with an export.

JoAnn Strommen · February 2016

Oops, correct not easily done thru query. I misread question. Can pull with my exports but query does not work. Sorry for the mis-direction.

querying last gifts gifts of a particular type or fund?

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