A contact report answers "who". Who to mail, who to call, who to invite, who has slipped away. It is the report behind every label run and every list you hand to a volunteer.
This article assumes you know your way around the builder — Reports covers that.
Families or Members
Report type, at the top of the builder, decides what a row is:
- Families — one row per household. What you want for a mailing: one envelope per family.
- Family Members — one row per person. What you want for birthdays, for a school list, for anything about individuals.
Choosing Families for a children's list, or Members for a mailing, is the most common wrong turn. If you are addressing an envelope, it's Families.
The Criteria That Matter Most
| Section | What it narrows by |
|---|
| Family Categories | Your own categories — Shabbos, Camp, Hebrew School. Limit to keeps only those; Exclude keeps everyone else |
| Address | City, state, zip — and whether an address is current |
| Members | Who the people are: gender, age, date of birth, and Next Occurrence — whose birthday or anniversary falls in a period you choose |
| Transactions | Giving history: category, amount, date range — and the box that returns the families with no matching transaction |
| Gifts | What you have given out, over a period, by gift or by count |
Three Reports Worth Having
Mailing labels for a category
- New contact report, type Families.
- Name it something like Shabbos Mailing.
- Under Family Categories, Limit to the category.
- Preview to check the count, then Save.
- On the reports list, click the Labels button on that row.
The labels open as a PDF in a new tab, ready to print. Next year, run the same saved report and it picks up everyone who has joined the category since.
Birthdays coming up
- New contact report, type Family Members.
- Under Members, set Next Occurrence to the period you want — next month, say.
- In Columns, check the date of birth, the Hebrew date of birth and the next occurrence.
- Save it. From then on it is one click.
The dashboard already shows you birthdays day to day; this is the report for planning a month ahead, or for a list to work from.
Who gave last year and not this year
This one takes two steps, because it is two questions: who gave last year, and which of those has not given this year.
- New contact report, type Families. Under Transactions, set the date range to last year. That is everyone who gave.
- Preview it, then Update Category into a category of its own — Gave Last Year.
- New report again. Under Family Categories, Limit to Gave Last Year. Under Transactions, set the range to this year and check Return families with no matching transaction.
- That is your lapsed donors: people who gave last year and have not given this year.
The second report on its own would not do it. “No transaction this year” also returns everybody who has never given at all, which is most of your database. The category is what holds the first answer still while you ask the second.
Lapsed donors are the warmest list an organization has, and almost nobody looks at it. It takes four minutes to build once and no time at all to run again.
What You Can Do With the Result
| Action | What you get |
|---|
| List | A printable PDF of the report as it appears on screen |
| Labels | Mailing labels, using each family's own label setting |
| Envelopes | Addresses laid out for envelopes |
| Export | CSV, for a spreadsheet or a mail-merge elsewhere |
| Email | Send to everybody the report found |
| Update Category | Add everyone found to a category — or remove them from one |
Updating a category from a report
On the Preview tab, Update Category asks which category and whether you are adding or removing, and applies it to everyone in the result. It is how a list becomes a group you can use again — for a route, a mailing, a batch gift.
It applies to the whole result, not to the fifty rows on screen. Check the match count before you confirm.
Worth Knowing
- Labels follow the family's own settings. How a name prints comes from that family's label and salutation settings, not from the report.
- Clone rather than start over. Most reports are a small variation on one you already have.
- Share the ones other people need. A checked Shared box saves somebody rebuilding your report badly.