I have a question about contacts. When you do a mailing to an organization and you record that mailing either as an appeal or as an action - how do you know who from that organization got the mailing.

I have inherited a database where every contact for an organiztion has a separate Organization record. Therefore we have 71 records with the organization name CT Department of Children and Families - each with only one contact.

I obviously need to merge them all into one record but they have history of what was mailed to that contact recorded as both appeals and actions. Merging the records will cause us to lose this history (or at least the detail of which contact it went to)

Anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this? I know how to use contact address attributes to record who will get what types of mailings in the future but how do you record the specific mailings? Melissa S. Graves
Director of Development Services
The Village for Families and Children
mgraves @ villageforchildren.org
www.villageforchildren.org

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I take it back I have 129 records for CT DCF. Melissa S. Graves Director of Development Services The Village for Families and Children mgraves @ villageforchildren.org www.villageforchildren.org GET ON THE BUS! Check out what the Blackbaud User Society is talking about today at www.blackbus.org!

Hi Melissa,
We use contact address attributes, like you; however, we might handle appeals different than mailings, such as:

1) Mailing for education event - we target org contacts who have the specific attribute codes for that mailing and place the general mailing under "action" in the org record. If we needed to know who received the mailing, we would put 2+2 together (codes plus action); but we rarely need to do this on general educ mailings.

2) Solicitation/Appeal - When setting up our appeal, we would place a description of our target audience in the notes, and if we're mailing to a contact at an organization, we would determine our contact for the appeal by their contact type.

Because soliciting support from an organization is generally a one-on-one effort, the solicitor might make a note in the NOTES tab as well about their contact. We would just place the general appeal on the org record.

Rachel Newell, Donor Services
Prairie View Mental Health
Newton, KS 67114
[Email Removed]

For those mailings added to actions, you might consider using the action attribute tab to record the contact name. For those mailings added to appeals, consider using the appeal's comment field. If the information is entered manually on each existing (129) org record before merging, each record’s action or appeal should merge with the next. Or create a query of all org records, contacts, and mailings and use an import file to update the final merged record. Will one of these options work for your situation? Kim Gajewski
Wisconsin Lutheran High School
[Email Removed]