Objective

Explain how to find contacts using specific criteria such as biographical information (name and address, etc.), or donation or designation information.

Overview

While there may be times when you want to find a specific contact (such as when you searched for a contact to redirect their designation), a lookup allows you to search the contact database for ALL contacts who meet a certain criteria. A lookup can be performed on any field--even multiple fields--in the contact database (more than 100 fields). It can also be performed on non-biographical criteria specific to contacts. For example, a lookup can find all contacts who have given more than $500 in the past year.

Reference Material

Lookups

Concepts

A lookup is dynamic. It always finds all contacts who meet the criteria at the moment of the lookup. For example, if you 50 contacts who have a home postal code of 4431, when you do a lookup on that field (home postal code) with a value of 4431, you will find 50 contacts. If you add a new contact with that postal code and perform the lookup again, you will find 51 contacts.

Exercises