[Odb-help] Answers to your ODB questions

[odb-help at lists.democracygroups.org]

Dear ODB Users:

We are getting an influx of new users and an
increase in questions on this list. Here are some recent
questions that came through, with some answers. Also progress
on the next version, which will have some major improvements,
is proceeding well...

-rich

1. questions from Maryann Petrocelli, Megawatt (Seattle)

I am trying to figure out if ODB is the right system for us.
We have been using it for several months. I have been getting
ready to send out a fundrasing appeal to our
database....tinkering with ODB has brought up many questions:
warning, I am NOT very tech savvy.

Q. Why does ODB list entries alphabetically by first name in
the main menu?

A. This is something left over early coding, that should
probably be changed. The entries are sorted by "name" which
is a field that exists both in the "People" table and in the
"Groups" table. Do people want to see this changed in the new
version? It is an easy fix to have ODB sort by last name.


Q. How do we account for partners with different last names
and the same address without having individual records for
each person? We would like to have one entry for couples, but
be able to enter TWO email addresses

A. At one point ODB allowed multiple email addresses to be
separated by a comma. This is something that we could
restore, but obviously it is not a great solution. Better
would be the ability to have people linked together within a
household... but that is a lot of work on the internals of
the software and for now other new features take precedence;
it is better to keep the data model simple and the software
development costs low. What we can do is add a setting
"allow2emails" to allow two email addresses to be included in
the email field. That way folks who need this could just turn
it on, and the copy emails feature could be programmed to
take advantage of this. Thoughts on this? (Keep in mind that
if someone wants to add features we can provide the source
code to you.)


Q. Can you export ODB data to Outlook?

A. We haven't built in a feature to make this seamless; but I
am assuming that Outlook has a feature to allow you to import
lists that are tab delimited text files? Mozilla Thunderbird
(the new free email program we are recommending to small
nonprofits -- go to www.mozilla.org) has this feature, and it
works well. Do you want to create a "vcard", or transfer one
or two entries at a time, or import an entire list? We would
love some feedback on this issue, maybe the best thing for us
to do is to emulate the way some other software program does
this.


2. Question from Carrie Benzschawel:

[Carrie is setting up ODB for several local organizations
  in Washington DC; we know of others who have set up local
  groups with ODB in Orlando, Seattle, Maine, and New York.
  Is anyone else setting up ODB for a number of groups?  We
  want to talk to you!  -rc ]

> I’ve got a group that did their first donor appeal mailing at the end
> of last year (using ODB, yeah!). They want to do another appeal in
> June. They will send the mailing in June to new prospects (which I
> plan on coding using the “type” field), but want to exclude people who
> gave to the last appeal.
>
> I initially tried to figure a way to select people by type and then
> exclude the donation category (and possibly the sub category, too)
> using the view custom query/ restrict the query functions. Couldn’t
> quite figure that one out.
>
> Then I thought it would be great if I could select people by type and
> then exclude people using the LastGave function (I’d want to exclude a
> range of dates like 11/01/04…02/09/05) This would be an extremely
> helpful query, for a lot of different things, but I couldn’t figure
> that one out either.

You are on the right track, you use the "lastgave" field...
you would want to copy the logic from the custom query area,
after you enter the date range you specified below:

lastgave >= #11/1/2004# AND lastgave <= #2/9/2005#

and the logical thing to do would be to put a "not" in front
of this:

not (lastgave >= #11/1/2004# AND lastgave <= #2/9/2005#)

or if you really just want to exclude recent donors, use:

lastgave< #11/1/2004#

but this would not give you exactly what you want, it would
give you people who HAD given but not during those recent
dates. To go one step further and include people who had
NEVER given, you would use the "isnull" trick. The query
would need to include everyone who had never give, for whom
the "lastgave" date would be null. This looks like this:

isnull(lastgave) or lastgave < #11/1/2004#

This should do the trick.


3. Question from a local user in Boston (Metco) and from
    Food Bank of Northeast Georgia:

Q. Can I "mass delete" records?

A. Yes.  Just Right-click on the "Import" button to
    see the "Mass Delete" function in ODB.  The ODB
    password must be entered, this is to prevent a
    casual user or volunteer from deleting all of
    your records!