I'm wanting us to send birthday cards to volunteers, key donors and prospects, and the like. While I can look at individual records, I cannot seem to find a way to pull a data set (name, address, birth date, etc.) based on a birth date range. For instance, a list of records that have birthdays in the month of January.
Anyone doing something similar, whether for birthdays, or some other data point?
Thanks.
William
Good afternoon William,
Where are you storing your birth date information?
I know, for example, that one of our organizations is using Attributes to store the birthdates that they collect, and those are being stored as Date data types.
If I create a List, for example, that evaluates that birthdate attribute value between 1/1/1900 and 1/1/2019, I get a list of 195 records that have been tagged with a January birthdate.
Thank you,
Brian
Edit: And I just realized how foolish I was to suggest a List built using that range of dates.
You could potentially build Criteria between 1/1 and 1/31 of every year, but that seems a bit rough.
Another option (if you're on v15) would be to use Analytics and some of those filters to only pull January dates.
Thanks for the response, Brian. I wish we were on v15, but not yet. We store birthdays as an Attribute.
It's just rather shocking to me that there isn't a straightforward way within a high-end CRM to accomplish things like this fairly easily.
And in a further note to make myself stick my foot in my mouth, the birthdate attribute isn't something immediately accessible in Analytics (unless I'm just missing it); I'm hopeful we could potentially customize access to that though.That leaves the last suggestion I have in my mind to be running your List of everyone with a birthday attribute (of any date) through an Output Set that displays that attribute, and then manually adding a month column beside the birthdays that you can use to sort against multiple years.This would be a great item to request as an enhancement, especially with Tessitura actively working on the constituent records for redesign.
Hi William - our Museum stores birthdays as an attribute as well. You could possibly pull a list of your key constituents, and use an output set for that attribute, then filter by month in Excel. Don't know if you've tried that before, but thought I would mention all the same. Thanks and good luck!
Thanks for the idea. I've gone down that path, but Attributes are not showing up in my Output Set Editor as an option. I have an Attributes-Corp/Foundation folder, but not one for individuals, nor does it show up under the other folders. Any ideas on that?
I think your DBA might be able to add more output set elements for you. I don't know how to attach the document here, but if you search "Output Set Builder Cookbook" on the Network website, and download a word doc called, "03_28_Output_Set_Builder_Cookbook_for_v12_5", page 26 has query elements for Attributes. Thanks again.