Managing birthdays and birthday reminders

In this article:

Little Green Light allows you to store birth dates for constituents. You also have the option to set up reports to remind you who has a birthday coming up so that you have the option to send or email congratulations.

Entering a birth date

You can enter a birth date, either with or without a year, within a constituent record:

Once you have entered and saved a birth date in someone's record, you will now see their birthday and age in search results.

If you would prefer that the age not be displayed, you can turn off the age display by checking the box shown below in Settings > Subscription settings > General:

Using birthdays for stewardship

You can search on birthdays in one of two ways:

  1. Birth month and day: Search for people who were born in the same month of the year. Or, if you want a narrower result, you can search by the day and month. Year is not taken into account.
  2. Birth month/day range: Search for people with birth dates that fall between certain dates, which could span more than a month. The year is not taken into account.

A common use for birthdays is to send out happy birthday notices to people whose birthdays are in the current or next month. To search for everyone who has a birthday in the current month, you can run a search like the one shown below, which uses the date range of "this month rel." ("rel." is short for "relative"). 

Creating a scheduled report as a reminder to send birthday greetings

Relative date searches like the one shown above are helpful if you save them as a report that you set up to re-run automatically. For example, you could set a report to run every month (monthly reports run on the first of the month) that gives you the birthdays for everyone who has a birthday this month.

Click the Export results button in the upper right of the Advanced search area:

Then, in the Customize step, select the fields you want in your report:

In the Save Export step, you can schedule the report to run on a monthly basis. 

Then click the blue Save Export button in the bottom right of the screen.

You'll receive an email with a link to the report on the first day of every month. That email will also contain a link to the search the report is running. You can then click into your LGL account and set up emails or a call sheet for anyone whose birthday takes place in a given month.