I posted this in Technical forum, where it didn't draw much response, so I thought I'd take another run at it shooting for end-users of extractions:
I work for an organization that's part of a consortium, and I've run into an issue with using constituencies to filter extractions and lists. Each organization has it's own patron constituency, and normally this constituency is generated by a transaction (contribution or ticket purchase), but some may be artifacts of an import operation or manually added, e.g. thinking you're on the Household record when you're really on the Individual. It goes like this.
I begin an extraction by excluding everyone who does not have my organization's basic constituency. I add my selection criteria, then I extract, outputting Household when it exists. So what I found recently in auditing a large mailing was a number of Individuals who have my organizational constituency, but in a Household that does not have the constituency. Since tickets and contributions are forced to Household, I suspect most of these are artifacts or manually generated. In any case, the corresponding Households are dropped from the extraction because the Household doesn't have the constituency on it's own record. (It is shown in parenthesis on the header of the household).
So what is the best practice for handling this?
1) Something in extractions I am overlooking or missing that takes this into account, or maybe something broken in our particular installation? Am I flipping to Household in the correct place?
2) A cleanup and audit to manually make sure Households have the constituency? Assuming these are mostly artifacts, maybe that would work, but we have several organizations and accounts coming in over the web and all kinds of other pot stirring going on all the time, so if we go this route, how often would we need to audit.
3) Manage our organizational constituencies on Households as an ongoing operation maybe daily or hourly, to copy or migrate the basic organizational constituencies to the associated Households? Assumes everyone wants, like us, to mail to Households, but some organizations may have their relationship with an individual member.
Wondering how other organizations handle this.
To help with your extraction, instead of suppressing all records without your constituency, you might want to use a list in your inclusion segments.
Create a Dynamic List with one criterion: Constituency IN (your organization's patron constituency), then choose the relationship option "Replace Individual With Household And Add All Primary Affiliates." Now you have a giant list of every record connected (household-wise) to a record with your constituency.
Then you can use this list as an additional criterion in each of your extraction segments.
List IN (that list), then whatever other ticket/contribution criteria you have, then boiling it down to the household for the segment.
This will help you get the people you want even if constituencies, contributions, and tickets are all over the place. Your other questions should be answered by discussions with the rest of your consortium. If tickets/contributions are on the household, then I believe constituencies should be there, too, but not manually. Whatever management is being done to add this constituency should take households into account, so this needs to change somewhere in the consortium. Good luck!
-- Mike
Michael,
You are correct all the way to the point where it gets to what should be versus what actually, in this case, is. Having discovered that outliers exist where the constituency isn't where it's expected to be, I'm just fishing around for the best way to handle them. There are some inelegant workarounds to leave them as is, but it's starting to look like strong management is best, but still working out if that management needs to be at organizational level or consortium level.
Hi John,
We are also in a consortium and I audit our organization's constituency monthly. That seems to work fine. I also make sure the constituency is in the household primarily though sometimes they dupe over to the individual for various reasons.
We are pretty much always addressing the household in mailings and call room so the issue of wanting to just address the individual doesn't really happen. That only becomes a talking point with constituencies for our board and other more focused extractions.
Hope that helps.
-Kate
Katy,
What you're doing was pretty much my first gut reaction, to just audit and clean my own org's data. Maybe I was hoping to farm it over to the consortium, though.
Have you put together a list / query that helps you identify the patrons who need attentions?
Thanks,
JOhn
I put together a list that includes everyone who has ever contributed/purchased tickets with us and is not already in our constituency and then I generate that every month and run it through the Manage Constituency Utility.
I ended up manually propagating the constituency from each individual to their household. I have a list of Individuals who have the constituency who are in Households that don't, which I can manually generate periodically to pick up any new outliers. Feels like a workaround, but it works with Tessitura-out-of-the-box.