[376sixer]

Does anyone have any procedures they can share about how to deal with business contacts who are invited to events? I really don't want to resort to creating all these individual records for people who are never going to be solicted.

Thanks.

[Michael Sherman]

If there are multiple contacts in a organization record we will choose "Invitation" as the contact type for each person who gets the invitation. Then select that type in RE:Mail.

In the event module we enter the org as the participant and each contact as a guest added as a participant.

[376sixer]

Thanks, Michael for your response. We really don't use Mail here very oftern. However, I've tried to get them to use your second option but people don't like the limitations of the guest option in Events for Business contacts.

-Alicia

[Jo Ward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 376sixer

Thanks, Michael for your response. We really don't use Mail here very oftern.
-Alicia

Alicia,

I'm really curious about why you don't use Mail very often. I use it every opportunity I can becuase of its excellent de-duping features. Even if I need fields that aren't availablee in Mail, such as phone numbers or email, I go through Mail and create an output query to feed into Export.

If I am going to use the output from Mail for an actual mailing, I use an Address Attribute for Contacts called Mail Type and can specify in Mail to pick only those with mail type = luncheon or whatever. You can also set it up to pick certain contact types AND any that have the particular mail type you want.

We've gotten to the point here, that the President and/or Development Director almost always want phone and email information for the people on the mailing lists. I use Mail to get the set of people I want, with all the duplicates removed, and then use my output query to export address and phone information for those people. I can also use the output query to globally add an appeal or action to those people also.

The Segmented Mail feature can be used to merge and dedup numerous queries without having to do them two at a time. If I just need a group of queries merged with the OR operator and am not going to do a mailing, i STILL use Mail and its output query and just delete the exported file from Mail.

Jo

[Michael Sherman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 376sixer

Thanks, Michael for your response. We really don't use Mail here very oftern. However, I've tried to get them to use your second option but people don't like the limitations of the guest option in Events for Business contacts.

-Alicia

What limitations are your people finding? Once you mark the guest as a participant you get the same features as a regular participant.

I agree with everything Jo said about RE:Mail. In fact, I think the "Create a query" feature is often overlooked. We have the same issue here with list requesters wanting phone numbers included. Doing the list through query (which has been the practice) will give you both members of the household instead of just the head. They then had to spend a lot of time deleting dups from the Excel spreadsheet.

[Melissa Siobhan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael Sherman

I agree with everything Jo said about RE:Mail. In fact, I think the "Create a query" feature is often overlooked. We have the same issue here with list requesters wanting phone numbers included. Doing the list through query (which has been the practice) will give you both members of the household instead of just the head. They then had to spend a lot of time deleting dups from the Excel spreadsheet.

In addition to the create a query feature you also have the assigned appeal option in Quick Letters. If you are using the data to send an appeal you can use Quick letters to de-dupe and assign the appeal. I then have a simple ask query (appeal ID = ) assigned to an export that i use for each and every direct mail export I do. It works great. Once the appeals are assigned I can then do analytical reporting once gifts start coming in with that appeal ID such as tracking response rates.