I believe some of you helped me with this question before, but I unfortunatley lost the link. Isn't there a way to create a simple HTML form that sends the responses to my email in Net Community? I did one on a formatted text and imaging part, but it doesn't seem to be sending anything to my inbox when I tested it. Thinking I"m missing something here.....
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We are looking toward getting our organization contacts in better order. Right now anyone from the president of a company (who should be getting fancy invitations) to a mailroom clerk (who is head of the committee that sends in donations in memory of a deceased co-worker and needs to receive the acknowledgement letter) is marked as primary contact. It is creating way too much manual fixing work to do. I'm looking at implemeting some strict criteria such as:

"Primary" = head of company/owne
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Thanks Melissa. Don't worry - 99.9% of the time we want spouse addresses to be the same and for updates to be applied to both. It will be a rare exception where we don't. Occasionally, there will be other very unusual reason's why we might want to keep an old address active etc. (We are a small shop, so we have to expect a little customized service and these will be donors with whom we have alot of one-to-one contact.)

I can use an attribute to indicate when an NCOA update should never be
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We have a routine in place for NCOA updates - that is good. The down side is we are losing information that has been custon updated for certain constituents - we do NOT want NCOA to touch these records. Obviously, I can add these exceptions to the query we run for the update, but would like input on best practice for this. How do others of you code/mark address records that should not be updated? Thanks!
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Thanks Jas! I will look into this. Appreciate the response.
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Okay - I've fiddle around long enough - can't seem to find an easy solution. I have 230 non-deliverable email addresses, all of the same phone type (we have four different types). Many of these constituents have more than one email address - I just want to remove the one that doesn't work. I have created a query that only pulls up these bad email addresses, but can't find a global change option that lets me delete all 230 bad emails in one step. Help?
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Thanks - I will definitely check that out!

As for your comment "I'm just being nerdy for no good reason" - I'm sure a few people thought that about Bill Gates at one time too! Nerdy for no good reason is where innovation comes from, because all of a sudden you see how you can use this to do that, and the next thing you know you have found a process that saves time and increases accuracy. If we database managers/coordinators/analysts don't want to test new waters, we are in the wrong job. Go
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Hey thanks for the tips, Jas. I do export to Access sometimes instead of Excel, depending on what sort of data manipulation I need to do, and almost always use the linked table manager with whichever format I export so I can use the tools I've set up in my main Access DB over and over (I never want to replace my main Access DB with an export, and I keep a copy of it in archive in case that ever happens accidentally.)

I am curious though about the exporting so it separates the one to many r
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Thank you Melisss, Jas and dstepp - obviously, we have a majority. That is the way we will go. We will be having a meeting with all parties concerned where we will hash out the details of exactly how things will be set up and stored - I'll make sure your input is included.

If you have any other advice (pifalls to avoid etc) please feel free to share. Thankfully we have importomatic, so importing the info will not be as much of a pain as it would without, but I'm sure we will still have o
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We are preparing to move all donor records from a small affiliate foundation into our Raiser's Edge database for several very good reasons. Thankfully, we get to stretch this project out - due date for completion is end of year. Below are the conditions we have to meet and what I see as the best option for us, but would love the thoughts of experts out there for unseen pitfalls and problems. Here goes:

*All gifts being moved over have already been posted to the Affiliate's accounts, so t
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Though I've not used nor do I have that plug in, I can feel your pain. Raiser's Edge queries are great, but not quite there. That is why, though I know many will throw rocks at me for not being a purist, I use Access extensively to parse, query, filter and match data. Before anyone throws the first stone, I DO NOT STORE DATA IN ACCESS! But, it is a handy tool to have, and I credit it with being able to do alot of cleanup in our database that was long overdue. Still not as nice as if I cou
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Very interesting - since I've never seen the backend of Team Fundraising I could only guess it might be similar to Sphere since you can track team donations etc on the front end. But, does RE even sell it anymore? We expressed interest in it and the Development members we were talking to discouraged us from pursuing that option.

"Unnecessary reliance on lots of Attributes" - Bingo! That is the problem we face with the alternate non-team fundraising solution offered to us by Blackbaud dev
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I like Net Community for what it is (an easy to use product for basic donations and basic event registration) but it is so tied to the confines of the Raiser's Edge data structure that I'm not sure it could work well for something like this. Sphere does (from what I understand Team Fundraiser used to be Blackbaud's version of Sphere) but, of course, that requires another purchase and more fees. Depending upon how many potential gifts you are looking at, you may find both cost advantage and a b
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We track United Way gifts the way Melissa has described, with one slight modification. The gift goes to our "anonymous" constituent record, with soft credits distributed to Employees. I'm not certain why it was decided to use our Anonymous record rather than have a record for United Way - this custom was started before I came to the organization. We do have an appeal dedicated to these gifts so they are easy to pull into reports.

We use "other" gifts in a variety of ways, so as Melissa i
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Thanks so much!!
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I didn't win it, I bought it but I LOVE this book. Wish I had been handed a copy as soon as i walked in the door - I came from an IT background, not a fund raising background. Finally landed a copy four months into the job - its underlined and page-marked all the way through. My dream is to actually be able to implement all those great ideas someday. How do you eat an elephant.........
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