CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

In 4.2.1 if I do an Advanced Search,  display the contact information and then Export Contacts I get the following options to choose from.

Export Merge Options

• Do not merge
• Merge All Contacts with the Same Address
• Merge Household Members into their Households
  

Postal Mailing Export
 

• Exclude contacts with "do not mail" privacy, no street address, or who are deceased.

These are very useful options.

We mail out magazines however, and, as is common with magazine subscriptions/memberships, we like to include the expiry date for the subscription/membership on the address label/sheet, particularly when the membership is close to expiring.

To get the Expiry date information to send to the mail house along with the addresses I need to display the search results as memberships and then Export members.  If I do that I do not get the Export Merge Options or the Postal Mailing Export options.


The problem is that some members don't want to receive the magazine.  It is only one of the member benefits they receive, so I can't  just cancel their memberships as then they will lose access to the other benefits.  But they really don't want the magazine to arrive at their house (often for religious/cultural reasons due to the content of the magazine - it contains pictures of breastfeeding women as those are the people we provide support to)

So at the moment I have to Export members and then manually remove the twenty or so addresses from the 14,000 people we send the magazine to.

It would be great if the Export Merge Options and the Postal Mailing Export options were available however you displayed the results whilst doing an Advanced Search

Thanks for the alternatives to removing the 'no mails' by hand and I will certainly be trying to avoid manual removal when we do the next mail house export.  This time was the first mail house export since we swtiched to Civi and I had already done many things to the data before I remembered the 'no mail/magazines'.

I had been lulled into a false sense of security because I remembered seeing the Postal Mailing Export options when I did a contact export and had thought 'Great, I'll be able to exclude the 'no mail' contacts when I do the export.'

However, we have 6 membership types so already have a smart group of 'financial members' for emails and other things.   Nesting of smart groups is not ideal especially when you have thousands of contacts in them.

I still think having the Export Merge Options and the Postal Mailing Export options available for Advanced Search results however they are displayed is a worthwhile suggestion for a usability improvement.