As many of you who have worked with DonorScape have discovered, the software was designed to query the database by common factors (i.e. to spit back all top prospects in Lubbock, TX).  Unfortunately this means that you can’t just input a whole list of ID numbers and do a query that extract profiles on all those folks.  To look up individual prospects by ID, most folks resort to looking up each ID through the Custom Query function.

Kath Sturgeon, the lovely and brilliant prospect guru down at Knox College came up with a brilliant, efficient solution.  She turned one of her Client Defined Fields, those text fields that clients designate with text of their choosing, into a slush field for pulling lists of IDs.  Every time she needs to pull a list of folks who have nothing particular in common except that she needs them all, right then, she does a Batch Update to the Client Defined Field she uses as a slush field with some tag for that list (such as “05/01/2012 Pull”).  Then she runs as Custom Query on the slush Client Defined Field for the tag (Constituent Information > Client Field > equal > 05/01/2012 Pull).  This gives her the list of folks she wants without having to look up each person individually.  Next time she needs a list, she does another Batch Update to the ID’s in question, which overwrites the previous text.  How smart!

You can learn all about how to do Batch Updates in our next Advanced Wealth Screening Webinar or watch an archived webinar here.