Building lists of constituents
Sometimes advanced queries by themselves are not enough. For instance, what if you want to put together a list for a mailing that includes all of your top 100 donors, plus anyone else who has donated within the last 12 months, excluding anyone who has expressed a desire not to receive mail? LGL makes this kind of advanced query possible by letting you build lists by combining (and subtracting) the results of several different searches.
With List Manager, you can add the constituents in any search and then refine it from there, selecting and deselecting constituents in bulk or one at a time. After that, your list can be used as a starting point for any query.
Build a new list
A good way to start building your list is to begin with a broad
set and then narrow it down. You can do this right from the
Constituents tab.
Taking the example described above (top 100, plus donors from the
past 12 months, minus constituents who don’t have valid
addresses or don’t want to receive mail), we would do the
following:
- Filter results by the Top 100 status and click the Select X button.
- Search for all constituents who have donated in the last 12 months and click the Select X button (in this case, all 9 constituents who gave in the last 12 months are in the top 100, but that is because this is a test account with very few records).
- Each time you select or deselect constituents, the X selected constituents link will be updated. You can look at the list in its current (unsaved) state by clicking on that link. You can also filter that list even further and then remove a group of constituents.
- Now that we have established our broad set, it’s time to start narrowing it down, and we can use the current working list as a starting point. Click on the Invalid mail tag to see all of the constituents on the current list who don’t have a valid mailing address, and click the Deselect X button. Then click on the X selected constituents link again to see the updated list.
- Click the Save list button to give it a name save the list and add a mailing or export it, etc. You can also set a list to be updated automatically, which means that it will be updated on a daily basis, so that it is always current and up to date with recent changes.
