Hi All, 

I hope someone can give a suggustion.   We have about 30,000 active donors.  We are working on our new fiscal year budget and because of the economy, drop in contributions and to prevent overlap mailings we  decided to consolidate appeals.   We have also decided that maybe donors should received two newsletters and one appeal each year.  We have also determined when the appeals will be mailed.  We want donors to receive mailing quarterly.  

Our new fiscal year appeals are the Independence appeal for July and Summer Newsletter scheduled for August.  Of course anyone who received Independence appeal should not get the summer newsletter.   This is the easy part for me. The difficult part running the query I get a good count for example for the Independence I get 20,000 donors. I get maybe 1,000 donors after I include and exclude what I want in the segment tab in Mail.  I believe that this is because of the overlap in presvious years.  So some people who will receive the newsletter or even the next appeal is excluded making the number of donors very low.  Do anyone have any idea what to do about this. 

Thanks

Can you explain how many queries you have going into the segmment tab and what they are? 

Are you using include/exclude in the attribute tab?  The include there is tricky and can eliminate anyone who does not meet that include.  I therefore only use exclude when I have queries in the segment tab.

From a direct mail perspective I believe every donor should get the newsletter every time regardless of when they got their last appeal.  Newsletters are informative and educational and you need to keep your donors informed between appeals.