The weather has been delightful this week, certainly more like June than March in the Ozarks. Warm fragrant days are interposed with nights of crashing thunderstorms and fresh rain. Plants are pushing through the rocky soil with wild abandon. The blooming pear trees rain white petals and reveal slender branches clad in delicate spring green. A few intrepid butterflies flit here and there among the wildflowers. 
All this loveliness is urging me to plunge in to my usual spring planting frenzy. I always plant way more than I need while in the throes of spring fever. All the work and weeding of summer never seems to cross my mind as I decide I can certainly use ten more tomato plants and three kinds of pumpkins. All those seedlings are so small and pretty, somehow I can’t seem to remember just how large they get later. Of course this inexorably ends with crowded garden beds and less yield from all the plants unless I ruthlessly thin them so those that are left can get all the attention they need.
Databases are kind of like gardens that way. It is easy for them to get overcrowded with old or outdated Donor records. This makes it cumbersome and takes your attention away from your active donors. Therefore our Spring Cleaning task for this week is to find and delete all those old, unproductive records.
The Grouping function in FundRaiser can be used to quickly find and delete records from your Master List. The first thing you need to decide is the criteria for your Grouping. Let's say you want to see everyone who has been in the database for at least five years, but has never given. You can create this Grouping by choosing Non-Donor on the COMMON PATTERNS tab. Then select the DONOR tab and the OTHER sub-tab. This will allow you to select a date range for ‘Date First Entered’. Put in your date range and click FINISH CRITERIA. Finally, click SAVE AND CREATE.If you would like ot now delete this (or any) Grouping of Donors, you may delete all the records within that Grouping by clicking the GROUPINGS menu at the top. Then select DELETE ALL FROM MASTER. You will be asked to confirm this action by typing in “certainly”. This is the only time deleting a record from a grouping deletes it from the Master List as well.
Good luck on this task and please call FundRaiser Tech Support at 800-543-4131 if you’d like assistance.
Sherry Willis is one of the fine Tech Support team at FundRaiser. She has many interests besides computers and has recently volunteered her time to train horses for the Whetstone Boys Ranch.