VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

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Compound Filters

In any list of criteria, for a record to be included it must meet all of the criteria listed. Where your needs are more complex than this, you can use Intellilists to create nested criteria. For example, the criteria below give you all of the men who can do carpentry and/or gardening:

Gender

Male

Skill

Any of: Carpentry, Gardening

What if you wanted to mail a letter to your volunteers who were within 25 miles of Albany, NY and who were either (Male and could do carpentry and/or gardening) or (Female and could do public speaking or gardening)? Using simple filters you'd need to do two mailings. By adding two Intellilists to the mix, you can do a single mail merge.

  1. Define a new Intellilist named "Male gardeners/carpenters/25 miles" whose criteria are (Gender: Male) and (Skill: Any of Carpentry, Gardening) and (Zip/postal code proximity: 25 miles from 12205). Save that list.
  2. Define another Intellilist named "Female gardeners/public speakers/25 miles" whose criteria are (Gender: Female) and (Skill: Any of Gardening, Public Speaking) and (Zip/postal code proximity: 25 miles from 12205).
  3. In your mail merge, check Only people on one or more lists, then select the two lists "Male gardeners/carpenters/25 miles" and "Female gardeners/public speakers/25 miles".

Your mail merge will now match people who are on either list, and therefore meet either set of criteria.

To get more exciting, you can embed Intellilists within another Intellilist's criteria - this is perfectly legal and lets you do some very powerful things.

The names of the lists above, e.g. "Female gardeners/public speakers/25 miles", don't actually mean anything to VSys. They are for you to use to remember what the list does; VSys wouldn't mind if you called all of your lists "Fred", but they wouldn't be very helpful to you that way.

See Also

Filters

Relationship Filters