CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Okay, I'm stumped. But first things first; the site in question is running CiviCRM 2.1 on a Drupal 6.6 system.  Now, the problem. We want to do a physical mailing. In order to conserve envelopes, paper, etc, we created household records for any address where two or more people shared an address (used a nice script from Giant Robot over on http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2735.0.html ). So far, so good. The problem is that we want to create labels (or export the information) for all households and all individuals who are NOT part of a household. Seems like this should be so simple but  I am hugely perplexed. Things I have tried . . .

Since all households are tagged (and all individuals in those households), I tried Search Builder to locate all individuals NOT equal to the tag ID. Trouble is, it only returns records that have some other tag. If I create an 'everyone' tag redo the search, it finds everybody. I've also looked in the Advanced search and other tried other AND/OR combinations, all of which turned up nothing useful.

I can only assume that creating physical mailings is something people do all the time and that in doing these mailings, they take advantage of pulling household records to minimize postage, etc.  How did you do it?

-- Marcel (Writer and Free Thinker at Large) Gagné

Hi Marcel - a step around we have used (a Custom Search would be soooo much better) was
- search all = Household Member of
- make smart Group

- search all = individuals
- make Group or Tag
- remove from Group/Tag those in above Smart Group (this bit needs a Cron, or update before doing a mailing!)

For mailout
- Search Build on above Smart Group, and also for the Group/Tag

I think that gives your outcome - but then not sure if Labels handle Household Name yet in 2.1?