Hi everyone-

I've spoken with some of you, but I'd love to hear your feedback on RecordRadar- the zip code segmentation tool for the Raiser's Edge.

What do you like and/or dislike?  Has it helped your organization?  Easy to use?  Ideas for further developments or changes that would benefit you?

I'd love to hear your ideas!

 

Thanks,

Pam

Finding names for solicitor visits to towns across the country usually involved a great number of steps: query/export in Raiser's Edge to find address records in a general region, import these addresses to a mapping program, zoom in and build a radius around a smaller concentration of datapoints and export those records into a spreadsheet, analyze results. If the initial import file did not contain enough variables to make selection decisions, the task of identifying the radius results within the backend database involved an extensive process of flagging records or building a hand-picked query that would eventually allow for output sufficient to make the decision.

Record Radar has streamlined this process for us by providing up-front selection capability and providing the option to create the Raiser’s Edge query from the plug-in. Rather than using precious time to identify records with geographic proximity to visit locations, I can now spend this time reviewing relevant results with additional query/export output in order to prioritize results for the solicitor(s). When fielding requests for lists related to solicitor trips, Record Radar has become my “home base” to filter for record results.

One improvement I would find valuable is the ability to preview results without having to build a query and output to see if a record makes the results. It would give me more time to adjust the input parameters before creating a query that drives a massive list of export fields for analysis.

Is there a way to make the query that Record Radar generates, be a dynamic query? BBNC has a bug, whereby a BBNC mailing list, based on a static query, may end up not going out, with no warning. We send out many blasts based on Zip Codes, and since RecordRadar creates static queries, we can't use it. I understand that the need for a static query is due to the ability to "mark" the records, an ability that's missing from dynamic queries - but why not figure out a way to tag records, but using a field within the record, so that the query can be dynamic? In fact, I'm surprised that RecordRadar doesn't offer an option to simply create a query whose only criteria is Preferred ZIP Code Is One Of ..., and fill in all of the ZIP codes XX miles from the input ZIP code? Then, we could simply customize that dynamic query with the rest of our desired filters.

I have already suggested this but I will do so again here.

It would be nice to have a list of large cities built into the application. So I don't have to go out there searching for what "Chicago" means in zip codes. I can just click "20 miles around Chicago"

Chicago is not a great example but the boroughs of NYC are harder to track down for someone. When I get a request for "all donors in manhattan" it would be nice to have that simplified.

If you wanted to really blow my socks off I would love to have an interactive map where I could drop a point and drag a circle for the radius around a city/area. More of a query of all the people in an area. For example I recently got a request for "all donors in northern California" which is easy to visualize but much harder to spell out in a query.

It is also sometimes useful to have multiple zip codes included. I know that I could merge several queries but it would be easier if I could do a "one of" type list of zip codes.