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.
I ended up manually propagating the constituency from each individual to their household. Feels like a workaround, but it works with Tessitura-out-of-the-box.