How to run a query

The Query tool answers questions about your member data: everyone aged 30 to 50, every leader in the youth work, everyone who’s given consent for the newsletter. You describe who you’re looking for, Hubb finds them, and the results become a list you can email, export or organise. This guide covers building and running your first query.

Running a query

1. Open the Query area from the left-hand navigation of the web office. To search across several groups, click ‘Create new query’ at the top left; to search within one group, select that group first and use the blue ‘+’ button at the bottom right.
2. Choose whether people must match all of your criteria or any of them.
3. Click to add a criterion, pick the field you’re asking about (age, group membership, a consent question, or one of your own custom fields), and set the condition, for example age is more than 29. Add more criteria in the same way: a second one of age is less than 51 turns it into a 30-to-50 search.
4. If you’ll want this question again, choose to save the query and set where it’s kept: just for you, or in a group folder so colleagues can use it too.
5. Click ‘Run’. Your results appear as a list of matching people, ready for a mailing or any of the other follow-up tasks.

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Good to know

• There isn’t a permission called ‘Query’, so don’t go looking for one. Who can use a query saved in a group folder depends on what the query asks about: Membership Manager for queries about people or organisations, Events access for event queries, and the documents permission for form-response queries. Give someone the permission that matches the data, and the query comes with it.
• A saved query is rerun against fresh data every time, and it remembers the columns you chose, so a monthly job becomes one click. From the saved list you can rerun it, edit it, or view the results from its last run.
• When a criterion needs a date, such as a date of birth, click the date in the calendar rather than typing it, otherwise it won’t be saved.
• A saved query shows which group it’s running on, with a pencil icon to change it. To find everyone, including people who aren’t in a smaller group yet, run it on your top group.
• To let a colleague see a saved query’s results, copy the address from your browser while it’s open and send it to them. They log in and rerun it themselves, so there’s no need to export or email the data around.
• Results start out showing just names; adding email addresses, dates or anything else is a job for the ‘Columns’ button, covered in our guide on choosing the columns in your results.
• Custom fields are what make queries really powerful. For a worked example that combines a custom date field, a saved query and a reusable email, see how to track DBS expiry dates. To move children into the right group each September, see how to move children up a group for the new school year.