I am trying to capture donors who have given $500 or more, consecutively in each of the past three years, 06-08. It sounds simple, but I must be doing something wrong. I tried queries, with and without parentheses, merging queries, and the Consecutive Years report. I would appreciate any help. Thank you,

I forgot to mention that I also have to exclude certain campaigns and funds.

You will absolutely want to include gift type.  You will need to decide what types of gifts you want to add together to equal $500.  cash only, cash & stock, Cash stock & pledges, etc.

If you do not select your gift types it will add everything.  So a $250 pledge and its $250 payment will add together and make that constituent look like a $500 donor when they really are only a $250 donor.  Even worse a $250 pledge and a $250 write off could be added together and make them look like a $500 donor when they really gave nothing.

Short story: Summary information you will ALWAYS want to include gift type criteria in your summary.

Melissa,

 Thanks alot for that tip. Makes complete sense, pledges should not be included in the total.I appreciate the help!

Hi Mark,
 It does seem that using the summaries is the best way. However, now my problem is that I do not need a total of what came in for the year, but donors that made a least one donation of $500 or greater in each of the last three years. I wasnt clear when I first posted the question, that was my mistake.

Might you have any other suggestions?

At least with the summary, that really narrowed down my results, so I can now work off of this list.

You can add to the summaries that the gift amounts to add into the summary must be at least $500 as well and then it should work for you.

You could use the Export module.

Create a constituent export, include the query we talked about here.

Then in the output, list gifts starting from $500 or more. Also make sure that you are including/excluding certain gift dates, funds, campaigns or gift types. Also, make special attention to soft credits in the query and in the export.

One more, in the export file you might need to delete people who do not have $500 individual gifts.

I do not recommend using export to find your constituents and rely on cleaning it up after the fact.  If you need to export them then great, but I highly recommend using query to group the constituents you know fit the criteria - then set up your export if you need one.  If you need to export you will need to again set up which gifts you want to include in the export (if any) although you've already done it once in query.

I ditto the caution for paying attention to your soft credit options!

Melissa and Dave,

 I appreciate all your help. I actually ended up finding a better way. I used the Consecutive Years Giving under Summary Information for Gift and that was really the closest to what I was looking for. But your ideas were also great and will keep them in mind for the future,

 Thanks Again! Have a great night!