Relatively Searching: Using BatchBook Search to Manage Communications
- Posted November 17th, 2010
- Filed under: Using BatchBook
Communicating and interacting with people on an ongoing basis is integral to building good relationships. Since BatchBook is all about relationships, we try to make it as easy as possible for you to keep tabs on the people you need to be in touch with.
One of my favorite functions in BatchBook is our Saved Searches, which I‘ve written about before. These handy gems make it easy for you to access your more commonly used queries. Combined with our built in ability to find the folks who you haven’t communicated with in a particular time period and you’ve got a great way to quickly find out who you may be neglecting.
Where this gets really cool is when you use natural language input in the date field and searching for items relative to today’s date rather than continually adjusting to keep the results current. Searches based on items like communicated with, not communicated with, created and last updated all accept things like ’7 days ago’ or ’30 days ago’ so you can be sure that you’ll always get updated information.
When creating these searches, it’s important to remember that the operator is being replaced with an actual date when the search is run so while it may seem like you need to change the wording of the search, BatchBook will take care of all the details behind the scenes for you.
For example,when using relative date searches like ’30 days ago’, a search for ‘Record communicated with less than 30 days ago’ is really asking
show me the records with a communication logged less than (or before) the date it was 30 days ago.
If you are looking for records with a communication within the last 30 days you would use the greater than:
show me the records with a communication greater than (or after) 30 days ago – knowing that when you run the search the ’30 days ago’ is putting in the actual date of today minus 30 days and returning the results for those that meet the criteria of having a communication after that specific date.
Note that the communicated with field isn’t a last communicated – it’s looking for any communication in that range.
A popular search many folks like to run is to look for the folks who you haven’t communicated with – our recently introduced ‘Record Not Communicated With’ option is great for this and would work similarly:
Record Not Communicated With > (greater than) 30 days ago will just get folks with no communications in the last 30 days.
Of course you can mix in other criteria to make the searches more powerful – narrow the results down by State, or only records that contain a specific tag. The options are endless and armed with these powerful search options you’ll be able to stay up to date with all of your contacts.
This is great, however what about saving this into created lists.. so that the Date that is entered into the search field after you type in 30 Days ago followed by search does not assign a date. This way searches can always be relative to 30 days from today.