The ABC's of the Raiser's Edge

All of the standard reports in the Raiser's Edge, as well as all mail functions, allow your organization to exclude

records from that report or mailing based on a variety of  record type Attributes. That's one of the primary reasons for using Attributes effectively. Attributes are incredibly powerful little tools that can often eliminate the need for a query. In fact, when coupled with the Create an Output query tool, they can even create queries for you! What a deal, right?

Let's take a look at a couple of examples of how excluding records based on Attributes might be helpful. In the first example, your organization tracks Gifts that are paying for auction items as a Yes/No  Gift Attributes. Your development director does not want those Gifts included in the Gift Detail and Summary reports you are creating for her for the next Board meeting. Using the Attributes tab of the report, you simply choose to Exclude gifts with an attribute of Auction Item=Yes! It's that simple! No standing on her head to write some complex query! No worrying about having to hold your mouth rightwink

 

Here's another one. In your database, Volunteers are tagged with a Constituent Code of Volunteer, and Volunteer Interest is tracked as a table (drop-down) value Constituent Attributes . In preparing to send a mailing to request Volunteers for your upcoming carnival, you don't want to mail to your Golf Tournament volunteers. After all, you want to save them for the golf tournament, right? So, after filtering on Constitutent Code=Volunteer, you can use the Attributes tab to further filter out your golfers by excluding those with a ConstituentAttributes of  Volunteer Interest equal to Golf.

 

 Do you have some creative ways to you can share to Exclude records from mailings or reports? I bet you do!!