Donors and Members in EveryAction

Background

Audubon's donor "database of record" is Salesforce, so for many donor reports — and especially for major donor relationship management — Salesforce is the system you'll want to use. For communication purposes, this presents two drawbacks:

1. Access to salesforce is limited to folks in Development.
2. Salesforce is NOT used for sending mass emails, and won't have up-to-date email addresses for members or their current subscription preferences.

Fortunately, over the past year, Audubon's Direct Response team (responsible for paper-mail fundraising appeals) has begun using EveryAction as a "data warehouse" for their mail campaigns — meaning now, all OFFline contribution information (from 2010 on) has been loaded into EveryAction. In addition, any online gifts from October 2016 on were made using EveryAction forms, so that information is on EA contact records as well. This information can be used to create audiences based on donation history, allowing us to better communicate with Audubon donors.

Emailing "Active Members of the Donor Variety"

Audubon's definition of a "Member" in the classic sense is anyone who has given $20 or more within the past year. If you are planning to send an email to Audubon members by this definition associated with your state office, center, or program, simply set up your Targeted Email to include this saved search in your audience:

Active Members of the Donor Variety

This saved search lives in the "Shared Common Searches" folder, which every EveryAction in the communications family has access to.

Please do NOT attempt to export donor emails for use in mass emails or mail merges in Outlook; doing so violates that donor's choice to receive emails from Audubon or not. As it happens, it also violates Audubon's privacy policy.

Creating Custom Donor Searches Using "Contribution Summaries" in Create a List

The search "Active Members of the Donor Variety" was created using a section of Create a List (EveryAction's interface for creating dynamic searches and static lists) called "Contribution Summaries".

First, when you expand the Contribution Summaries section, you'll need to select "Both Financial Households and Individuals" from the top-most dropdown:

As it happens, we're not doing householding in EveryAction at the moment, but it doesn't hurt to include both anyway. Once this is chosen, all the previously greyed-out and unusable fields in this section will become usable.

The Contribution Summaries section has the following sub-sections:

• Lifetime — total value, average value, and total count per record
• Highest Previous Contribution (HPC) — based on the largest donation amount ever
• Most Recent Contribution (MRC)

• First Contribution

In the Lifetime section, you can ignore the "Attributed" fields. Those have to do with "soft credits", which Audubon isn't using in EveryAction.

In the other three sub-sections, the most useful fields will be the fields for upper and lower limits on amounts and the date field. The amount fields are simple number entry fields, and you can only use one of them if you want no upper or lower limit.

Contribution Summaries Continued: Setting a Date Range

The date fields are a bit tricky. First, you have to decide how you want to set the dates:

"Between" will make calendar date pickers appear:

Again, like the amount fields, you can include a lower limit, an upper limit, or both. The single arrows change the month, and the double arrows change the year.

"In the range of" is probably the most useful, because rather than fixed dates, it lets you choose dynamic ranges. There are some standard options that you can choose from an additional dropdown:

Audubon's fiscal year is July-June.

Perhaps the most powerful range type is "Custom". This reveals yet MORE previously hidden fields that let you set a range of as many days, months, or years as you want (up to 999):

You can enter the low number in the first field and the high number in the second or vice versa, whichever makes sense to you — though for your own sanity, it's best to pick one way and stick to it (yours truly always does low, then high). And as with the other lower/upper bound field pairs, you can use one, or the other, or both.

The "in the month of" option lets you cherry-pick one or several months. Considering that it's not dynamic like the range option above, this has not been particularly useful for email audiences.

Disclaimers about Contribution Record Visibility and Timing

This works to create audiences of both on- and off-line donors for two reasons: because the Direct Response team is uploading offline contributions for their data warehouse (as mentioned above), and because Contribution Summaries bases its results on contribution records in all of Audubon's EveryAction committees. So this will show you National mail donors from your state, center, or program, regardless of whether that gift was specifically for your state, center, or program.

Here's an unfortunate quirk, though: while this process will return the donors for whom your criteria is true, you won't be able to see many of the contributions that make it true — unless you have access to the National Audubon Society EveryAction Committee, to which the offline contributions are added. If you're interested, however, there's a neat trick that will let you see those donations for a single contact, even if you don't have NAS Committee access.

Finally, a note on when the offline contributions are added. Currently new contributions are being manually uploaded on a more-or-less bi-monthly basis. For this reason, there may be a 2-4 week delay between mail donations being received, and them being recorded on their associated EveryAction contact. However, a great work is in place to automate this process, so at some point, there will be much less delay. Online gifts made through EveryAction forms, as you might expect, will be represented in Contribution Summaries immediately.

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