Search for constituents without email

In this article:

Overview

There are a variety of situations when you need to search for constituents with blank email address fields. These can include looking for people to exclude from an email blast, preparing a list of people you want to acquire email addresses from in the coming year, and others.

Why searching for blank emails doesn't work

When attempting a search like this, most people navigate to Constituents, search on "Email", and then look for an "is blank" option. Intuitively, this seems like the right way to set up this search. But in this case it does not work. Asking LGL to find "is blank" when the field has no value has the same result as trying to divide 0 by 0: It causes an error.

Creating a search for constituents with blank email fields

Fortunately, the data you need is not difficult to pull into search results; it's just that there is a specific way to go about searching for it. Here are the steps you can follow to find constituent records with blank "Email" fields:

  1. Navigate to the Constituents tab
  2. Leave "Names" as the search criteria and leave the "contain" entry field blank (you are searching for everyone in your account)
  3. Click on "Advanced options" and select "Add nested/sub query". Then choose "And not"
  4. Select "Email" and then select "is not blank"
  5. Click the Search button

By following these steps, you'll be searching for everyone in the LGL account and suppressing anyone who does have an email address. Your search results will contain only those whose record does not contain an email address.

Here's how your constituent search will look:

You can also watch this video showing how to set up the search:

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