(5 min read)

Create a List is a powerful search feature that gives you many options to create static lists and dynamic saved searches based on any of the data you’ve collected about your contacts. Understanding how to create searches is crucial for segmenting your outreach efforts or for building Automations that help you reach the right people at the right time.

Read more about creating lists and saved searches
Read more about automation
 

If you’re new to our system - or you just want some ideas for things you can and should be doing - we have some tips for typical searches you might want to use with your fundraising program. You can vary them to fit your needs.

Creating a LYBUNT search

You can use the Contribution Summaries section to help you find donors who gave last year but not this year (LYBUNT).

For this search, you can include everyone based on their giving as part of a financial household or as individuals.

Select a Most Recent Contribution date In the range of > Last Calendar Year.

If you also want to exclude high-dollar donors, you can limit your search in the same step by selecting those with a Highest Previous Contribution of less than $1000.

 

Finding mid-level donors

The giving thresholds for mid-level giving will vary from one organization to the next. For this example, we’re defining mid-level donors as anyone whose most recent gift was in the last 24 months, and whose Highest Previous Contribution was between $150 and $999.99.

Open the Contribution Summaries section and select Both Financial Households and Individuals as your universe.

Enter your amount range in the Highest Previous Contribution section.

Then set the range to people who gave in the last 24 months by selecting the Most Recent Date > In the range of > Custom from the Most Recent Contribution section.

Discovering sustainers with failing payments

This search is commonly used with an Automation to find sustainers whose payment processing has failed, so you can automatically send them an email asking them to update their payment information in the Self Service Portal.

Open the Recurring Commitments section and select the Frequency your donors give and the Status of Failing. For this automation, you may want to only include monthly donors in your entrance criteria.

To limit the search to everyone with a recent failing payment, scroll down to the Failed Processing Attempts at the bottom of the section and select a processing failure date in the range of yesterday.

 

Finding major donors based on location

You can easily discover which major donors are in a specific location to invite to an in-person event or for your Executive Director to meet with on a trip.

To begin, open Contribution Summaries and select both Financial Households and Individuals.

Then, search for everyone whose Highest Previous Contribution amount was at least $1,000.

You can narrow the universe in the same step to donors within 25 miles of a particular location from the Address section using Zip Radius.

 

Reaching planned giving prospects

This basic planned giving search is another one that you may want to vary to meet your needs.

To begin, open Contribution Summaries and select both Financial Households and Individuals.

You can then limit your search to those with a Total Lifetime Count of at least four contributions.

From the same section, you can narrow your choice to anyone whose most recent contribution was within the last two years.

You will then want to further narrow your list by finding people who have been with you for a while. From the same section, you can select anyone whose First Contribution Date was five or more years ago.

You can then narrow your universe to anyone over 50 in the same step from the Age * Registration Date section. Use the Age From criteria to find your target demographic.

You will then need to remove anyone already in your Planned Giving program or already identified as a prospect. You will need to add a second step to your search by selecting Add Step > Remove Contacts.

In this second step, you can use the Planned Giving section to identify anyone who has a planned giving status of any kind. Select all the Status options to exclude anyone who already has a planned giving plan from your search.

Creating birthday greetings

You can easily find everyone whose birthday is today (or some other date) using the Age * Registration Date section in Create a List.

The Birthday option uses only the month and day (not year) to help you create your search.

To create an entry search for an automated birthday greeting, you will probably want to search on Birthday > In the range of > Today.

If you send birthday greetings in the mail, you may instead want to pick Birthday > In the range of > Custom to select anyone having a birthday in the next 30 to 60 days, giving your mail shop time to get the cards out to them.

You can use the checkbox below the Birthday field to include anyone whose birthday is in the selected month, even if you don’t have an exact day for them. Anyone without an exact day will be treated as if their birthday is on the first day of the month.

 

Recognizing gift anniversaries

If you’d like to recognize a donor each year on the anniversary of their first gift, you can use a search field available in the Contribution Summaries section.

Begin your search by selecting whether you want to search for Only Individuals or include households.

Then, scroll down in this page section to First Contribution and set the Anniversary of First Contribution to be In the range of > Today for an Automation or In the range of > Next Month (or a Custom range 30 days from now) if you are doing a mailing.