Households/Individuals in list for direct mail

Chris Long

Manager, Electronic Communications

502.566.5196 p | 502.210.3299 m

The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts

501 West Main Street, Louisville, KY  40202

www.kentuckycenter.org

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What was your criteria for the inclusion segments?  Sometimes if the criteria can be found on both the households and the affiliates they will both end up in your list unless you check off the box "replace individual constituents with primary households, if one exists".  For example, if you are pulling by ticket history - i.e. had tickets to X season or X performance and that is only stored on the household you shouldn't have both coming up on the list.  However, if you are pulling on an attribute that both households and affiliates might have i.e. email subscriber, you will get both on the list.  I always have to ask myself with each segment "is this information on the household, the affiliates, or both?" as it will affect how I setup the segment.   

Chris Long

Manager, Electronic Communications

502.566.5196 p | 502.210.3299 m

The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts

501 West Main Street, Louisville, KY  40202

www.kentuckycenter.org

Facebook | YouTube | Flicker | Twitter | Blog

Hi all -

Without looking at the extraction segments, I've unfortunately not got a whole lot of helpful things to say - but here's a couple of 'could be helpful in the right circumstances'. 

1. Double and triple check your segments for that 'Replace with Households'. Which I'm sure you've done, but it's so easy to miss one. A ray of light - v12 will have really thorough count reports where it will be easier to see who is pulled on what segment. I personally can't wait!

2. This is probably not the case, but are you sure that Carol or Mike Brady is a primary member of the household (and not perhaps just affiliated, but didn't get that primary checkbox checked in the affiliation). And also, are you sure that Mike or Carol are not duplicates accounts out there. We are finding tons of those - accounts we didn't know were dups because they were dups off of Name 2 or something like that.

3. It can be tedious, but if you save each segment to a list and see if you can find the rogue affiliate account you can at least narrow down which segment is giving you an issue.

4. Emails (re Christine's reply). Don't get me started on emails. As soon as you add emails to the mixture you are talking a horse of a different extraction than one for just a direct mail as emails can live (at least in our system) on ANY account - household or affiliate. I won't go into the hoops I do for emails here, but suffice it to say, there are a lot of hoops to get the right accounts with emails.

So see, as promised. Not super helpful info, but maybe something will spark an AHA moment for someone out there. I'd recommend doing some troubleshooting with #3 there and if you find the problem, we'd probably all love to know what it was!

- Heather

P.S. Just a side note - I've been trying to use the word 'affiliate' vs 'individual' when describing those specific types of accounts because you'll still want true individuals on final output, yes?  

Thank you both for your thoughts! I think I may have found my mistake. I was building a list for a direct mail piece, wanting a list of patrons who had attended a few specific shows, but I had accidentally copied over segments from an extraction used for an email. My criteria included:

EAddress Type [household box checked]

Tickets - Performance - No. [household box checked]

Obviously, I should have deleted EAddress Type because I didn't need or want that. 

In the Advanced Relationship Manager, I had checked "Replace Individuals with Households." 

So is it possible that my list included individual patrons with email addresses (as opposed to patrons without email addresses), despite the fact that I had indicated in the Adv Relationship Manager that I wanted households?

Will -

In theory and according to all documentation I've read, the Advanced Relationship wizard should take the pool of people you've gathered with whatever criteria you selected, and THEN do the action indicated in that area. So, [again, I'm not official Tessi here, so take this as just one individual's thoughts] if you included something that pulled Carol Brady because she had an email, and clicked the 'Replace Individuals with HH' and Carol did have a primary HH, she should be replaced with her household account in that segment.

It's sort of a step 1, step 2 process per segment. Step 1 - pull a group of accounts that meet the criteria. Step 2 - monkey with that pool of people according to Advanced Relationship Wizard and nothing else (the wizard does not evaluate against your criteria)

---------

Christine -

I know there are several training sessions at the conference about lists and extractions and even one specifically dealing with the advanced relationship wizard. I imagine those will be some very popular sessions. (if you go to My Conference and search for extractions they'll show up).

We've started migrating to using purposes on emails MUCH more because it is a gazillion times easier to pull based on that. But that doesn't necessarily help when you want to pull any emails for X ticket purchases, be it on household or affiliate. It totally can be done, and I'm probably making this too complicated. I tend to do that - Overthinkers R Us.

Without completely taking over this thread (APOLOGIES WILL, I totally ramble on here for a bit), here's just some food for thought when it comes to pulling emails. Keep in mind that without using purposes, what I'm suggesting will basically pull anyone with an email who meets the criteria. If you have accounts that have emails on the HH, A1 & A2, they are going to get three emails. And if for any reason they have the same email on any of those accounts, they'll be duplicated in the final pull. Hopefully whatever you use to email will filter out those dups, but I just wanted to mention that in case you were throwing them into outlook or something.

The scenarios we most run into are:

1. Tix on HH & email on HH - no emails on A1/2

2. Tix on HH and email on A1/2 (on one or both of the affiliates)

3. Tix on HH and email both on HH and A1/2

Pre v11, you would just suppress from the top anyone who didn't have an email, but you don't want to do that anymore because then you'd suppress scenario #2. So I basically always pull things in two segments if I'm dealing with looking for things that live on the HH (transactions).

1. HH that have tix and email on A1/2

- Criteria: Anyone with X Tickets

- Advanced Relationship Magic: I have a dynamic list of all individuals in our system that have emails (or mail purpose). Then in the 'Add Individuals' tab I add anyone with a primary affiliation type and I filter off this list. In the Keep/Replace Individual I use 'Only keep related constituents that were added'. This, in theory, will give me only affiliates of a HH with tix who are on that list I used as a filter. 

I totally acknowledge some people may not be able to do this due to the size of their db. We're not a huge org, so this works okay for me.  

2. HH that have tix and email

- Criteria: Anyone with X Tickets and an active email.

This is a totally simplified 5,000 feet view of the extraction, but my point is, that filter option on the wizard can be really useful. And then you add in opt outs/do-nots and you start getting really whirly in the brain, but that's another topic all together.

Boy, I hope I didn't just muddle the waters. Did I mention the sessions at the conference? Those are trained professionals who will show you the light! (I'm also participating in a lunch discussion about using V11 Constituents for Marketing. If you really want to hear me possibly babble on more, come join us!)

HTH,

Heather

Hi Heather,

Thanks for your helpful response!

I thought the same thing so I'm surprised to see some households and individuals mixed into my list contents. The only thing I can come up with at this point is that there was a user error! For one of my segments, I must have forgotten to hit the dial for "replace individuals with households."

So, let me see if I can sum up my scenario: 

I was preparing an extraction for a direct mail piece. 

I mistakenly set my criteria in my segments to pull email addresses, which for us are on the individual level.

I had my advanced relationship wizard set to "replace individuals with Households." That should have rolled households like Mike Brady and Carol Brady into the email on the primary person in the household.

I likely accidentally didn't hit "replace Indiv with HH" for one of my segments, which is why I got some HH and Indivds in those households."

Hi Will -

That's the scenario that seems most likely to me, although it seems a bit of a cop-out to blame it on the user. ;) 

One last check you could always do (a pain, but better safe than sorry?) is save your extraction to a list, then pull that list in a list and again set it to replace individuals with households. That would do a final EXTRA cleansing of the list. Or at least a double check to see if the list contents change.

Onward we march in the land of list pulling!

Heather

Hi Will -

That's the scenario that seems most likely to me, although it seems a bit of a cop-out to blame it on the user. ;) 

One last check you could always do (a pain, but better safe than sorry?) is save your extraction to a list, then pull that list in a list and again set it to replace individuals with households. That would do a final EXTRA cleansing of the list. Or at least a double check to see if the list contents change.

Onward we march in the land of list pulling!

Heather

From: Will Crockett <bounce-willcrockett9579@tessituranetwork.com>
Sent: 6/14/2013 4:26:49 PM

Hi Heather,

Thanks for your helpful response!

 

I thought the same thing so I'm surprised to see some households and individuals mixed into my list contents. The only thing I can come up with at this point is that there was a user error! For one of my segments, I must have forgotten to hit the dial for "replace individuals with households."

 

So, let me see if I can sum up my scenario: 

I was preparing an extraction for a direct mail piece. 

I mistakenly set my criteria in my segments to pull email addresses, which for us are on the individual level.

I had my advanced relationship wizard set to "replace individuals with Households." That should have rolled households like Mike Brady and Carol Brady into the email on the primary person in the household.

I likely accidentally didn't hit "replace Indiv with HH" for one of my segments, which is why I got some HH and Indivds in those households."

 

 

 

 

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