FundRaiser Blog
Clues on Using Que(ue)s
In this week's Kim Klein blog, several steps are suggested on how one might encourage donors to continue their support when the founder leaves the organization. One of the first is to "make a list" of people to personally contact with the news that you (the founder) are leaving. Another is to send a letter "to all your donors and funders" to welcome in the new person who is to take your place. While it's easy to create a grouping of all donors and funders, it may not be so easy to create a grouping of those who "would assume they would hear it from you".
Unless you've coded them in some way unique to this idea (and why would you have?), then you'll probably need to pick them out of your database one by one. You could, of course, give them each a common code as you finde each record and then be able to group them together in the future, but you'll most likely never need that particular mix of donors grouped together again. So why not use the Que?
I know, the true spelling is queue, and it is, according to the dictionary, and among other things, a lineup of people or things, usually to be used in the order in which they are lined up. In the FundRaiser toolbar, there is an icon marked QUE which can help you create a queue. We call it a Que, because that fits better on the icon. To create a que, simply go to the record you want to include, and, once on the record, click the que toolbar icon once. The first time you do this, a message will pop up, sayingk in effect that you're creating a que, and that you won't see the message again, and that you can right-click the icon to access the que in the future.
To put the next record in the que, go to the name record, and click once on the que icon. Repeat the process until all records that you think you want are in the que. At that point, you can right'click the que icon to open the que window and see what records have been entered. From this window, you can save the que in a file and be able to recall it (load it) at any time in the future. You can have multiple que files, and you can join que files by loading them together and then saving the result.
A que list can be used as the focus for Mass Mailings, in case you want to write to all those folks, and it can also be used in the Master report and in any User-Defined reports. So create your que, create a phone list as a User-Defined report, and start calling those folks "all in a row", as Kim Klein suggests.
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