I am having a brain lapse this mornign. I am trying to pull anyone in our system that has given us a single gift of $500.00 or more at any given time. When I pull the constituent query it comes up with a bunch of duplicates. What am I doing wrong or what can I do to prevent that from happening. I will need to use that query and look at each individuals giving history and their profile one by one. We are trying to get more members to our annual giving club and the executive director thought that would be a place to start. Thanks in advance for all your help!

I believe the reason for you getting duplicates is that your query is pulling the information each time it matches the criteria- if John Doe donates $500 and $600 in two different years, it will show up.  There are two things I know of to help cut this down:

1) In the Tools menu, under Query Options, click on the Record Processing tab and click the box that says Suppress Duplicate Rows.  This might help, but I think it only helps if your output doesn't show different results for each time a constituent is listed (from my example above, I think it only works if you simply want to see John Doe's name- if you have the gift date and amount listed, it will still show)

2) Use Export on the query.  You can pull to see only specified gifts, or have each gift display, but in the same row rather than different ones as in the query.  Export slices and dices the information pulled from queries, which only groups information.  (at least, that's how I understand it anyway)

I hope this helps.

Jackie Wyatt

Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario

I was thinking that maybe I should have used a gift query instead of a constituent query? Maybe

If you use a gift query to give you any gift over $500, you'll end up with the same duplication of names if somebody gave more than one gift over $500.

However, if you're using the query to get an overview of those people in order to double-click on the name and look at their record more closely, you'll probably just need to sort by name and deal with the dups. 

... I just realized you can use for a constituent query criterium: Largest Gift Amount greater than or equal to $500. This will give you the necessary constituents without duplicates.

 I think I would just use a gift summary criteria (constituent query).  Total number of gifts >= 1 with the filter gift amount >= $500 and anything else you want.  as it is a summary field it should pull each name only once as it is looking at all gifts.

The problem is likely with the output you are including in your query.  if you only put in constituent ID /name there will be no duplicates.  If you add in gift amount you will get that person listed with each gift listed separately.  If you do not need the gift info then do not include it.  if you need the gift info you will need to take that query to a report or to export.  (this is why we all say over and over - query is not a reporting tool - report and export are!)