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.
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.