When running the year-end report for major donors, we have found a few donors (that we know about) who are not being pulled.  Could they have been entered a certain way to suppress them from reports?  Our concern is we are missing other donors when running query/report for Annual Report.

 Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Melanie

Does your query/queries contain any 'Does not' or 'Not one of' criteria? I've come accross that pitfall before. Also, are your missing donors' gifts split?

Good points.  None are split gifts, and the "Does not" is only for "capital campaign".  It is just strange, because it seems so random on who isn't being pulled.  The only thing in common with the two is that they are Corps, but so are others that are being pulled.

 Thank you for your help.

With your ''Does not equal capital campaign" - as an experiment it might be worth trying it with "one of" and then selecting everything other than capital campaign. It sounds silly and probably illogical, but I've had similar problems before and this seemed to solve it...

Having said that you'll probably find that it has no effect whatsoever...

Ha!  I think it is definitly worth a try.  I have often found the illogical tends to be logical.

 I'll let you know.

At first glance, I think it worked!  Both I know were majors, but missing - did show.  Woo Hoo.  Will go through better later - but thank you!

I found this technique to help with Gift Type issues also.  One would think the results would be two separate sets of donors but, in fact, I have gotten significantly better data by avoiding "does not equal."  Instead, choose all the possibilities and then remove the small number you want to exclude.

Lee Harrison:

With your ''Does not equal capital campaign" - as an experiment it might be worth trying it with "one of" and then selecting everything other than capital campaign. It sounds silly and probably illogical, but I've had similar problems before and this seemed to solve it...

Having said that you'll probably find that it has no effect whatsoever...

I know now what you are talking about after I had the same errors occurr in reporting.  Now I share this with my query builders: when you want to use negative operators like "does not equal" and "does not contain" on the "big tables" (GIFTS, APPEALS, RELATIONSHIPS, and ATTRIBUTES - they appear as spreadsheets on a constituent record), you can eliminate constituents who actually qualify for the query.  Example: You may think you are eliminating constituents who have given in-kind gifts with "Gift type does not equal gift-in-kind" in a non-gift query, but you are also eliminating constituents who gave BOTH in-kind gifts and cash gifts.   It's better to use "Gift type one of " and use all gift types except the gift-in-kind types.

Using the same criteria, "gift type does not equal gift-in-kind" will give you the results you are looking for in a GIFT query.

I find that RE gives me just what I asked for :)  The advice ends up being the same, avoid negative operators and "stay positive."

LOL - RE always gives you what you ask for - the problem is figuring out how to ask the right question...