Lists provide a way to view the information about constituents and financials within your database.

The Lists within Donorfy cover the following areas:

• Constituent List
• Activity List
• Campaign List
• Fundraising Page List
• Connection List
• Constituent Tag List
• Change Log List
• Gift Aid Declaration List
• Opportunity List
• Opportunity Pledges List
• Recurring Payment Instruction List
• Recurring Payment Beneficiaries List
• Transaction List (ALL / Payment or Allocation)
• ChangeLog List

When you create a List you need to ask yourself what question is it that you are wanting to answer...

It may be something like:

• I need a list of people who are tagged with "volunteer" - that would be a Constituent List
• I need to know what donations came in from Trusts - that would be a Transaction List
• I need a list of open major gift asks - that would be an Opportunities List
  and so on.

Whilst these Lists are powerful tools on their own, you may find that to answer the question you have you may need to build some further stages in, for example:

• Tagging constituents in a List first so that they can be brought in to another List

Or

• it may be that you need to combine Lists - this would need to be by downloading data from the List and then using the power of Excel to perhaps do some matching or referencing. 

Are there other types of Lists? 

Yes, both the Campaign and Opportunities area have a List (of sorts) that you can download

Can Lists be used for anything else?

Yes, Lists can be used for other functions too, for example:

• Auto Tagging
• MailChimp List
• Campaign Segment building
• Bulk archiving
• Create a constituent segment in the Constituent Search Menu
  
  

What does a List look like?

All Lists look pretty much the same, though some have more functionality built into them depending on the type of List it is that you are working with. These additional items are explained in the List that it is relevant to. 

The images below are taken from a Constituent List.

 Header

This area features your List name and, depending on the List type, some further options

Within the header you will also see details about when the List was added and when it was last displayed and by who:

Lock feature

You can also lock a List so that it can not be accidentally altered. The default is off, but if you toggle the switch to Yes and Save & Preview it will now lock the List and prevent any changes to it:

Filters

You can add as many filters as you wish, just be sure to add them logically, use the correct connectors (AND / OR) and use brackets to close multiple selections

Actions bar

This is located just above the data output/data view area and includes a number of icons

• Cloud - Download List to Excel
• Luggage tags - Tagging option
• Printer - PDF Report
• Box - Archive records option
• Monkey - MailChimp. Only available on a Constituent List.

Data output area

This section is where all of your data is outputted to.

You can add/take away fields by clicking on the field selector icon to the right of the screen. You can also select the number of records to view and alter the screen view too.

The fields are categorised and open by clicking on the relevant area:

Hyperlinks

Where there is a blue hyperlink - you can click through to the record within the same browser tab. Or, right-click and open in a new browser tab (better option).

How many rows can my List display?

You should be aware that while there is no fixed maximum number of rows that a List can display, there are soft limits of around 100,000 rows. Lists with more rows than that, or Lists with more complex filters that are based on transactional data, may be slow to run, may time out, and may not be downloadable.

If you required result sets greater than 100,000 rows you should split your Lists - for example by date range - into smaller, more management result sets.

If your Donorfy is hosted in your OwnAzure database you can use 3rd party tools (eg Excel, SQL Server Management Studio) to retrieve much higher volumes of data much more efficiently by connecting the SQL Views. This is especially useful when certain business processes are dependent on these queries because (a) they are much faster, (b) much more scalable and (c) less prone to being changed.

How to create a List

See this article about Creating a new List