I *think* this was answered before in one of the webinars, but I'm curious about why the ScoreOMatic value can only be a text field and not, say... a number field.  I thought it had something to do with the way the database was set up, but I honestly forget the details...

That text field really limits the ability to run queries and sorts on the scores.... 

I'm pretty sure I could use ImportOMatic to convert those scores to a number value, but there simply might be too many steps involved to make it worthwhile.... 

 

Any plans to support numbers/values in the future?

 

Thanks!

Hi Tom,
The reason for text is to allow for negative values. For some unknown reason,RE does not allow negative numbers in a number attribute.
Thanks,
Steve

Same goes for decimal values, unfortunately. I also seem to remember that zero values got converted to blank, but I haven't checked that in years.

I would think the ability to query and sort on a number value would be MUCH more popular than the ability to store negative values. I've rolled out two simple scores to my staff so far and both times I almost immediately got the question: "Can we sort by that?"

I can't be sure, but I don't think I've ever seen a donor scoring system that went into the negatives as a matter of practice. Sure, negative values could be created as a matter of process if you're removing points for something, but wouldn't it be fairly easy to just replace a negative value with a zero before writing it into an attribute field in Raiser's Edge?

The "scale" that you work with (all positive numbers or negative and positive numbers) is really just arbitrary... But being unable to make a query which returns all alumni with a "VIP Score of Over 25" seems really limiting...

I just tried a query using a string attribute value greater than 25 and it seemed to work correctly. Still doesn't help the sorting problem though. I'll let Jeff make the call on allowing number attributes. I have heard at least one client so far that wanted to use decimal values (seems like whole numbers would work just as well), and zeros do save as blank values, not 0.

If it's for Tom we can certainly do it!

OK, so how about this... the attribute types that are allowed are text or numeric, and if a numeric one is selected the user will be warned that numeric attributes will have a "floor" value of 0 (cannot be negative) and that decimal values will be rounded to the nearest integer value. Does that cover all our bases?

Jeff,

I think that would be totally, incredibly amazing!  And very, very useful !

From a practical standpoint with numeric values you could then even build new scores that use existing scores...

BTW: This all came up because I made a simple ScoreOMatic Attribute for "Number of Events Attended"... Our Alumni Engagement area loved it and immediately asked if they could sort by the largest number...

-Tom

Hi Tom,

This forum thread came up in conversation today. I've got some good news, we added the ability to save a score to a numeric attribute type (Version 1.2.0.8 in April). I'm not sure if this is what you meant by "From a practical standpoint with numeric values you could then even build new scores that use existing scores..." but we also added a sample SQL function that shows how to use an existing numeric attribute value as a score: http://omatic-scoreomatic.helpdocsonline.com/sql-functions

Hope these make your day!

Jeff