Making Full use of Lists and List Folders

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Making Full use of Lists and List FoldersI want to create some mailing lists for email bulletins related to several of issues we are involved with - domestic violence, substance abuse, and so on. Sometimes of course I'll need to mail to everyone who has subscribed to ANY of these e-bulletins. What's the best way to create the combined mailing and avoid duplicates?


The trick is to create a List Folder for E-Bulletins, and put each of your specific-issue lists under it.

How to do this: Go to List Management under Supervisory/System Setup in the main menu. You will see all the lists and tags you have created displayed in the List Explorer.

Highlight "PersonLists"

Click the New button, enter the text "E-Bulletins", and click OK. (You can ignore the other fields on the list properties form.) You have created your general E-Bulletin List.

Now, Highlight the "E-Bulletins" List. Again click New, and enter the name of your first issue list. And click OK. You have created a sublist. Add the other sublists in the same way. You will see that they all appear in the List Explorer under E-Bulletins.

When they are all entered, click the OK button on the List Management panel.

Now, build your lists however you want to - from the Personal Information Form, from the List Browser, or from the Query. Any record you put on a sublist will automatically be on the parent E-Bulletin list as well. What's more - these hierarchical lists are automatically deduped.  Suppose Charlie Smith is on all three of your individual issue lists. these lists. When you Blast to the parent list, Charlie will appear only once!

Now blasting to the combined list is no harder then blasting to an individual list - just select E-Bulletins in the List Browser, and you will have selected a deduped combination of all your single issue bulletin lists!

Great idea, but I already created three issue lists and populated them before I knew about this. Now what?
No problem. Create your E-Bulletins list as we discussed above. Now just MOVE each of your single issue lists into the E-Bulletins Lists.

How to do this? On the List Management page, highlight one of the single issue lists. Now right click, and select CUT in the context menu. Next Highlight the E-Bulletin List, right-click again, and select PASTE. The list will move into the E-Bulletin list. Do this for all three - and be sure to click OK before leaving List Management or your changes will not be saved.

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