[Nina Williams]

I have a segmented mailing of 4000 + pulled using Mail Tab, Quick letters, with filters-- I now have to pull certain groups from this. However, as with all segmented mailings, a constituent may fall into more than one segment, so just pulling Board won稚 necessarily pull them from the list because the are also donors, alumni etc. There are 5 specific groups (each in its own query) that I need to exclude from the large list. I am thinking that I should now make two segmented lists (with output queries). 1. Original mailing list (all queries that were originally included) and 2. Exclusion list (those 5 groups I need to not mail to). Then Merge/Subtract the exclusion output query form the Original Output query for bulk mailing. I think this should leave me the bulk mailing list and the exclusion output query for 1st class mailing with no duplications.



Any thoughts?

[Melissa Siobhan]

Depending on your criteria for these filters there may be a way to do this another way. If you are excluding groups by attribute or constituent code you can do this all in Quick letters.

Set the constituent codes on the filters tab to only be those you will allow and anyone in your segment queries with any other constituent code will be droppedl

On the attributes tab you can exclude any groups of attributes by using the exclude option and they will all be excluded from the entire mailing.

I hope this will help.

[Nina Williams]

Unfortunately, one of the groups I need to exclude is those individual donors who gave $500 or more in the last 2 years, but leave in other donors. This is not a code, or attribute in my system, just pullable by query. One of the reasons I do this through Quick letters is that it is so easy to exclude attributes (all our do not mail, do not phone codes are attributes)

[Melissa Siobhan]

One way to accomplish this easily is to use that query at the top of the list and then they will all be put into a segment together - you can assign them a special temporary appeal code (or maybe even no appeal code) and assign the others the appropriate appeal code.

If you want to use the output file from mail as your mail file include assigned appeal and package and you cen manually pull out those that were assigned the temporary code. Or you can do your final mailing through export querying on those who were assigned the proper code by your process in mail. This is probably how I would handle it.

[dstepp]

When I have a mailing that is just too complex to include/exclude everyone I want to exclude because they cross groups and the hierarchy of segmenting and using filters doesn't work I do the following:

Use segment queries, filters and attribute inclusions/exclusions to get as close to my final group as possible. Then use the segmenting hierarchy to assign appeal codes - including dummy appeals as Melissa suggests. Then export the mail file with appeal and package codes. I also create output file(s).

Then I use the output file with an export to get the extra data needed for evaluation for the constituents in my mailing (attributes, gift totals, last gift amounts or date, volunteer status etc.).

Then I match the mailing list with the constituent data in Access and continue filtering those constituents I don't want in Access or Excel.

A lot of work but sometimes necessary to get the cleanest list possible.

DS

So how's the Cleveland Institute of Art these days? I haven't visited in quite a long time.

[Elaine Tucker]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nina Williams

I have a segmented mailing of 4000 + pulled using Mail Tab, Quick letters, with filters-- I now have to pull certain groups from this. However, as with all segmented mailings, a constituent may fall into more than one segment, so just pulling Board won稚 necessarily pull them from the list because the are also donors, alumni etc. There are 5 specific groups (each in its own query) that I need to exclude from the large list. I am thinking that I should now make two segmented lists (with output queries). 1. Original mailing list (all queries that were originally included) and 2. Exclusion list (those 5 groups I need to not mail to). Then Merge/Subtract the exclusion output query form the Original Output query for bulk mailing. I think this should leave me the bulk mailing list and the exclusion output query for 1st class mailing with no duplications.




Any thoughts?

Nina,

I think this would work especially if you don't want to have appeal codes or attributes that are dummy codes.

Make sure that your queries are static so if you need to go back and redo them that you get the same result.

I'd then run an check on the final output to see if you've missed anything in your criteria logic that resulted in someone "accidentally" showing up.

Cheers,
Elaine

[nisaac]

Nina,

I run into this all the time - I think it's similar. This may not help, but here's what I do. Each of our mailings is associated wtih an appeal. I create packages for each of my segments (Board, donors >=150, event attendees, patients, etc.) Using quick mail, I add the appeal and package to each segment. I then run it and update the records with these assigned appeal/packages. I export the quick mail and include the packate description in the export. Sometimes, I also create a query from the mail run so I can include other fields.

This works for me and helps the development group. We carefully select the segments in order of importance: i.e., a Board member query is first, a patient query is second, a donor third, etc. The development group sees where each person fell in the segment and when the people respond, we also know what segment they were included in by the assigned package.

Hope this helps!

[Nina Williams]

Thanks everyone -- I got it to work. Spot checked the lists and most inportantly, those names to be excluded looked good. When I added the total of the two lists it matched the original total, so if I missed someone, I missed them completely.