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Let's say I'm sending a mailing out to a number of organizations and I want the mailing to go to a real person. I set up my query, run it through export. Now, if the organization has a CEO, I want the mailing to go to him/her. If not, I'd like the mailing to go the Vice-President, if not...etc. However, when I try to set this up in export it doesn't seem to work. Export Individual Relationship (or contact relationship), go to criteria - export 1 relationship, check "Include contacts only", Selected contact types, bring over CEO, VP, etc., Order by "Contact Type", Descending. Now this process works in the mail module but some mailings need to go out through export and I can't get this contact-type-ranking system to work. Is it just me?
I contacted BB support for help but haven't gotten much. The latest response was "The Order By section of selecting your contacts only applies when you export more than 1 contact type. So if you export 2 contacts then use the Order By and delete the secondary column, you should be able to achieve the results you need."
Is it just me or does that seem redundant? If I want one contact, I have to export two and delete the second column? Oh, and I tried it, and it doesn't work. Any help/thoughts from the RE Forum would be greatly appreciated.
we have run into similar difficulties with identifying which perso nat an org should get a mailing. Strictly speaking you are misusing the Contact type, since there is already a field called "position" on a relationship record.
One approach we tried was to use a temporary relationship attribute on the people we wanted to mail to. We would either globally add the attribute, or manaully do it, depending on the circumstances. Once the mailing is done, we delete the attribute.
You can query on that attribute to do whatever you want.
__________________ Peter Gulka
Chief Bus Driver
Blackbaud User Society www.blackbus.org
No one is MISUSING contact types. We all use RE differently and while some ways work better and maybe there is a better way than the way JC has done it - it is not a misuse of RE. I actually think that in some instances being able to heirarchically mail to constituents by position would sometimes be better than the system I have.
Has exporting 2 contact types & ordering by contact type worked for you yet? I find it works okay for me. It does seem pretty ridiculous but that's the way it goes
Actually, Ida, that was BBaud's recommendation to me - I need to export more than one contact type, in fact I need to export as many as types I ask for. Unfortunately this presents two problems:
First, it seems to me, and maybe I have this wrong, the reason why we'd want to rank contact types is exactly for the reason I'm suggesting: I want to mail to 50 organizations. If there's a CEO, send it to them, if not send it to Contact type B. This is exactly how it functions in the Mail Module, but not in Export. Doing what BBaud is proposing (export several contact types and then erase the ones you don't want) is, well, stoopid/backward/you choose the adjective.
Second, it doesn't actually work. Even if I ask to export multiple contact types, it doesn't actually rank them in the export according to criteria I provide. What I discovered (with the assistance of a very nice BBaud rep) is that this process ranks contact types BY ALPHABETICAL ORDER! Is that at all useful? Does that make sense from a software programming standpoint? It doesn't seem to me that that was the design feature the programmers had in mind.
My guess is that the logic I'm using to understand the purpose and uses of ranking contact types is mistaken. But if that's the case, I'd greatly appreciate any insight from RE Forum Users or BBaud itself into what IS the logic behind this functionality and how it's supposed to be used.
Thanks to help from BBaud Support, I was able to get an answer to this problem. Ordering contact types using the process I outlined above returns contact types ranked in alphabetical order by design. To get what I want (give me the CEO, if there isn't one give me the VP etc.) I need to use address processing. It works. Thanks everybody for your help/comments.
Does anyone have any good list of contact types they use and work well. I am having trouble here appeasing everyone and the database is expected to perform miracles it can not possibly do.
What do you to where They want the CEO as primary contact but acknowledgements to someone else, pledge reminders to someone altogether different. If someone is primary but gets everythign i do notwant to set up multiple relationships for the person just to be able to pull them right.
I hate the order criteria. I was thinking of numbering them 1) primary, 2) secondary, 3) receipt, 4) pledge reminder, etc. but then when I want to do receipts I need to pull 3 and 1 and do them in reverse sort order. It is so not going to be intutive to anyone but me.
If I use attributes the person still has to be checked as a contact - do I use the secondary type and just add attributes to further clarify. Do each of you go through this process with every single contact in your database and code them for each type of mailing they should get? How do I still order them when I want it to go to secondary if they have the receipt attribute - primary if no one has that attribute?
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