Get Your Giving Clubs Right (With Free Stuff)

Not too long ago, I got a really interesting Raiser's Edge question. "How can I find a constituent's longest stretch of consecutive years given, for my giving clubs?" You may have a great donor who gave from 1995-2005, missed a year, and then started giving again. He wouldn't show up in a Consecutive Years Giving report due to that one missing year, but you still want to send the right ask letter and amount.

I was intrigued by the problem. Intrigue being my greatest motivator, I was in the lab for a little while coming up with a good solution and thought I'd share it with you, my faithful readers. Just download and run this query, save the results as an import file, and import it as a constituent attribute called Max Consecutive Years. Now the field is available in queries, exports and mailings!

You can download the query here and run it against your Raiser's Edge database in SQL Management Studio. The result set will serve as your import file with all the required fields pre-filled. Now just perform a quick constituent attribute import and you're done!

Max consecutive years given

As with any stuff I give out on The Spotlight, this isn't a core piece of the product; it's custom so that means it is unsupported. My analysts (or Raiser's Edge analysts) cannot help run the query or take questions on it. RE support can definitely help if you're stuck on the import side of things, however. If you have any problems with it, please leave a comment, hit the forums, or send me an email.