[jas.]

Having a strange problem in a segmented mailing here, wondering if anyone else has had something similar happen.

Q1 pulls our Trustees -- by constituent code with a blank Date To
Q2, Q3, Q4 pull membership groups, people with certain attributes, etc.
Q5 pulls donors to a certain area, by Fund or gift attribute, with an <ask> date field

They're all simple queries. What's happening is that one of the trustees from Q1 is being eliminated by Q5. I should say 'at least one,' because we haven't done comprehensive checking on all of them yet -- we just noticed this one. We've run the Mailing with just Q1, then with Q1 and Q2, then added Q3, and then Q4, and it was fine, until we added Q5.

This is odd to me because it shouldn't matter what's in Q5, since she was a part of Q1 and should be included anyway.

edited for additional info which has just come to light: actually she IS part of Q5, by virtue of a soft credited gift. But Q5 is pulling based on the soft credit recipients, so she should be eliminated from Q5 by virtue of being in Q1, not the other way around. BUT the hard credit (her foundation) is pulling in the RE Mail list.

Searching on the KB shows that there are a few issues with segmented mailings, where constituents don't show up in the correct segment, but nothing like this. I wonder if it's happened before and I just haven't noticed. We're going to have to work around it by exporting that query separately and merging them in Access.

Anyway, I'm curious if any of you have seen something like this?

[Jo Ward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jas.

Having a strange problem in a segmented mailing here, wondering if anyone else has had something similar happen.

Q1 pulls our Trustees -- by constituent code with a blank Date To
Q2, Q3, Q4 pull membership groups, people with certain attributes, etc.
Q5 pulls donors to a certain area, by Fund or gift attribute, with an <ask> date field

They're all simple queries. What's happening is that one of the trustees from Q1 is being eliminated by Q5. I should say 'at least one,' because we haven't done comprehensive checking on all of them yet -- we just noticed this one. We've run the Mailing with just Q1, then with Q1 and Q2, then added Q3, and then Q4, and it was fine, until we added Q5.

This is odd to me because it shouldn't matter what's in Q5, since she was a part of Q1 and should be included anyway.

edited for additional info which has just come to light: actually she IS part of Q5, by virtue of a soft credited gift. But Q5 is pulling based on the soft credit recipients, so she should be eliminated from Q5 by virtue of being in Q1, not the other way around. BUT the hard credit (her foundation) is pulling in the RE Mail list.

Searching on the KB shows that there are a few issues with segmented mailings, where constituents don't show up in the correct segment, but nothing like this. I wonder if it's happened before and I just haven't noticed. We're going to have to work around it by exporting that query separately and merging them in Access.

Anyway, I'm curious if any of you have seen something like this?

James,

I'm hoping this is all tied to the soft credit aspect of query 5. I use segmented mail very often, for query merging as well as mailing, and have never knowingly had a problem like this. Frankly, this scares me to death!! Have you talked to customer support about this?

Please keep us informed about anything you find out.

Thanks.
Jo

[jas.]

I haven't called them yet, but am about to. It makes me worry too, but I suspect it has something to do with soft credits as well.

I'm running further analysis and will post more.


edited: crisis averted, apparently. I just recreated the Quick Letters from scratch, included all my queries again, and it seems to have worked. i am currently working under the assumption that the Quick Letters we were using has gotten corrupted. I don't see it often, but it has happened before -- as a matter of fact I just tried to rerun it using the old Quick Letters, and I got a 'database or object is read only' error, which... uh, what?


Edited again: problem solved. Turns out it was a twofold problem:

1. a gift from her personal foundation that qualified for query 5 wasn't soft-credited to her, and
2. in the organization contact address, the 'If this person qualifies to receive as a contact and an individual' box was checked to mail to contact only.

Wow.