Question

Photo of Michael Garrison

1

Sending one mailing per youth family

In the "Person and Family Field Guide" documentation, there is an example given of blended families where "Brian" is a part of two families. The documentation lists some details, which includes the following line:

A report showing the parents of Brian will list out Ben Jones as well as Jim and Sarah Simmons. Each family will be listed as separate rows on the report.

We are trying, and failing, to create a report of this kind, and I'd like to know if I'm reading that line a little too literally.

We have created a Data View that gives us the parents of kids who have attended our Middle School activities in the past 16 weeks. (using the "Parent" transformation). Then we created a Report based on that Data View that gives the Person Name and Mailing Address for those people.

To continue to use the example in the documentation, the result of that report would be three rows for Brian: One for Ben Jones, one for Jim Simmons and one for Sarah Simmons. What we'd like instead, is what the documentation seems to imply: 2 rows. One for Ben Jones, and one for Jim and Sarah Simmons. That way we're not sending a mailing to each parent, just each family.

(To take this one step further, it would be nice if it also eliminated duplicate families- in the event, say, that two students were both active participants- we still only need to send one mailing to their house).

Is any of this possible using the out-of-the-box Rock Reporting tools, or will it be possible when the Mail Merge update comes along?

Thanks

  • Photo of Michael Garrison

    0

    Thanks to my collegue's attendance at the Rock Convention this week (I was very disappointed to be unable to attend), I've gotten an opportunity to play around with the 4.0 Alpha.

    As I'm sure was obvious, the original point of my post was for doing what Mail Merge will do in that release.

    I can confirm that the (even more impressive/wonderful than I'd imagined) new Mail Merge feature does exactly what we're looking for. If a student (or multiple students) are in multiple families, you can check the "Combine family members" box in the Mail Merge screen and *magically* each HOUSEHOLD only gets a single mailing.

    I should clarify my original question a bit and note that the current version of Rock (3.2?) IS already smart enough to include each parent only once in the filter, even if multiple qualifying children are set in the filter with the "Parent" post-filter transformation set. That behavior naturally continues so that Mail Merge is, as far as I can tell, perfect.

    I will leave this parting thought though: I belive that there should be an option to similarly combine family members in more than just MailMerge- I can see this being useful at least in reporting, but perhaps also in group lists. I will log this as a suggestion for the team, but consider this post closed.

  • Photo of Arran France

    0

    Hey Michael, did you ever manage to get this to work? I'm sure there's a lot of use for this so I'd be really interested in knowing.

    • Michael Garrison

      No... presently we are generating reports with family name and address, exporting to excel, filtering to remove duplicates and then using that as a Word mail merge source. I'm still hoping the forthcoming mail merge feature of Rock will be intelligent enough to offer this capability