Grouping mechanism

[winakeytoheaven]

I evaluated Donor Manager some time ago as a replacement for my own Access-based contraption. I say "contraption" because I was constantly having to fix, tweak or otherwise spend time changing it every time I needed something new. Donor Manager does virtually everything I need or could want...except letting me make relational ad-hoc groupings of donors for trip planning or other purposes requiring an explicit selection of individual donors.

Yes, I could commandeer a user-defined flag and create a related filter to accomplish the same purpose, but after ten such groupings I have to start throwing away previous groupings to accomodate new ones because the "flat" way it would have to be done is quite limited (there are only 10 user-defined check-mark fields). My existing database does this kind of grouping (though it was implemented "cheaply" and I got what I paid for), but I have become quite dependent upon it.

My transition to DM would be instantaneous if DM could [1] be given a way to create any number of named "Groups" (with related Description) and then [2] be able to manually place one or more contacts into any Group, and then additionally [3] be able to restrict the donor set for reports, labels, data export and other operations via Groups like they can already be restricted by Filters.

It could be that this has been added to DM since my evaluation a year ago that fulfills my wish or is done some better way, but I don't know that. What do you think?

[winakeytoheaven]

Well, I downloaded DM 5.33. The Church definition feature with its ability to show related donors is the closest thing to a fully-relational grouping mechanism I can find. I misremembered the "Lists" feature as being the user-defined check marks, so those lists are indeed simpler but there are still only 10 of them. Moreover, their names have to be pretty short. They couldn't be something like "PD trip June 2006 visitees".

I'm guessing that any donor can only have one Church affiliation at a time, thus I couldn't create a "church" to be my ad-hoc grouping of donors without losing their real church affiliation. Sigh. The Group mechanism I want would look and act very much like the Church mechanism, except that any donor could be in 0, 1 or more Groups, and a Groups could have any mix of 0, 1 or more Donors.

[jmuehleisen]

Ken,

Thanks for your good posting.

I understand exactly what you are saying, and you may be intererested in knowing that the exact feature you are requesting is working its way into the program, for the exact reason that you have stated.

For many people, the 10 check list groups is very sufficient, and right now, the only way to do "ad hoc grouping" is indeed to use one of the 10 check boxes.

But, for others, 10 lists simply isn't enough. And before long there will be a much more flexible grouping feature in the program. And I'll be depending on people like you who use this a lot to help beta test it and give feedback to make it better.

I'm actually torn between doing it in one of two ways: using "Categories" (like Outlook), or using "Groups" (like ACT). At this point, I'm leaning toward the ACT approach (it's a bit easier to program), but I haven't decided yet.

Anyway, thanks for the good post and the careful explanation of what you would like to see.

[BinBuka]

I'd love to see this feature, something like Outlook's Categories, as well! Please let me know if you need testers for it.

[JRSmith]

This type of option could also be used when DM is used for small organizations who have multipule missionaries. We could then group the donors by missionaries or projects.

[jmuehleisen]

A "grouping" feature is indeed coming in the next major update to the donor manager. Essentially, it will allow you to create an unlimited number of groups and to place partners into as many groups as are appropriate.

Now, it may not work just like the Outlook grouping, but the concept would be similar.