How to Use Advanced Relationship Search

MonkeyPod’s Advanced Relationship Search helps you find exactly who you’re looking for by combining multiple data points across your records. You can search by relationship details, gifts, purchases, location, email engagement, membership status, and much more. What's more, once you have the right group of relationships, you can take action in a variety of ways including adding them to a mailing list, campaign or pipeline.

Here are just a few examples of how you can use Advanced Search:

Giving + Sales: Find donors who've given over $1000 last year but have never purchased a ticket to your annual gala. Export results to print mailing labels for a special invitation, and bulk add an interaction to the relationships to note that the invite was sent.
Giving + Email engagement: Find relationships who have never donated but regularly open your emails. These are likely to be warm prospects who might be ready for a first-time ask! After running your search, use the option to add them all to a new email campaign.
Sales + Location: Identify supporters who purchased tickets to an event last year and live locally, as they might be good candidates for early-bird outreach for this year's fundraising event.
Vendor history: Find vendors you've paid more than $5,000 in the past year for annual contract reviews or 1099 preparation.
Volunteer HQ + Giving: Find volunteers who logged activity last year but have never made a financial gift. They could be good candidates for a volunteer-to-donor conversion appeal. Use the bulk action option to add them to a campaign.
Giving + Role: Look for board members who have not made a gift this fiscal year. If you're not already using the Board HQ app, this is a helpful way for staff to manage board giving compliance.

Note: The Advanced Relationship Search documented here was released March 18, 2026. If you're still using the classic interface, see the article about "Classic" Advanced Relationship Search.

Overview of searching

The basic building blocks of your search are criteria—individual filters like relationship type, location, or giving history. You can combine multiple criteria into a condition (for example: individuals who donated more than $5,000 last year and live within 10 miles). And you can chain multiple conditions together to broaden or narrow your results.

What criteria can be used in my search?

There are dozens of criteria available for use in your searches.

Basic Information	Search relationship details such as name, organization, job title, and birth date. Use the Name, organization or alias contains criterion to match a partial name or alias.
Type	Include or exclude specific relationship types in your search.
Roles	Include or exclude specific roles in your search.
Giving	Search based on a donor's giving history, including donations, grants, and pledges. Find relationships with total gifts above or below a certain amount or frequency within any timeframe. You can also search for relationships who did or did not give through a specific fundraising page, donation form, or donation option, and filter for recurring donors using the monthly or annual giving criteria. Optionally include or exclude soft credits or a time period for the criteria.
Sales	Search based on purchase history (including total purchase amount or number of purchases above or below a certain threshold), or whether or not a specific item was purchased. Optionally specify a time period for that purchase criteria.
Vendors	Search for relationships that have been paid or billed above or below a certain amount, or a certain number of times. Optionally narrow the search to a specific time period.
Transactions	Find transactions tagged with any tag—useful for locating transactions tied to a specific campaign or event.
Email	Search based on whether a relationship has an email address on file, has a "do not email" preference set, has subscribed or unsubscribed to a specific list, or meets certain email open and click rate thresholds. You can also search by email domain (@emaildomain.com) to find all relationships from the same organization.
Location	Search based on city, state, zip code, or a certain distance from an address. Use the criterion "Street address on file" if you're preparing a print mailing list, in order to filter out any addresses missing that important information.
Custom Attributes	Search based on your organization's custom attributes.
Anonymity	Search for relationships that have or have not been flagged with a preference to stay anonymous.
Record History	Search based on when a record was created or last updated.
Member HQ	If you have MonkeyPod's Member HQ app installed, search for relationships with active or inactive memberships, no current membership, or memberships expiring soon.
Volunteer HQ	If you have MonkeyPod's Volunteer HQ app installed, search based on volunteer hours, areas of interest, or whether a relationship did not volunteer during a specific time period.

How do I build a search?

To start searching, choose Relationships from the main menu, then select Advanced Search.

Next, choose Select criteria and choose the first criterion for your search.

Depending on the chosen criterion, additional fields appear for you to specify related relevant details. The example below shows Gave at least as the selected criterion, and it has additional options such as the dollar amount of the gift, an optional date range when the gift was made, and an option to count soft credits as part of the giving total. The result is a request to find relationships that have given at least $1000 in 2025, not including soft credits.

Adding Multiple Criteria Within a Condition

Within a single condition, you can add more than one criterion using the + button.

Selecting + will add a new criterion at the end of the list. Choose how that new criterion should relate to the previous criterion by selecting AND to narrow the search, or choose OR to expand it. The example below narrows the search by asking to find only businesses ("Corporate" relationship types) who gave at least $1000 in 2025.

This example below broadens the search by asking to find any relationship that either gave $1,000 in 2025 OR any relationship that is a business ("Corporate" relationship type).

This is important to remember!

AND: Results must match both conditions. Use this to narrow your search results.
OR: Results can match either condition. Use this to broaden your search results.

Continue adding criteria as needed using the + option.

To remove a criterion, click the X to the right of it.

Once you have your search set up, click View Matching Relationships to see your results.

A description of your search appears at the top of the page, above the search results.

Example: Multiple AND/OR Criteria — Finding your super-engaged supporters

Let's say you run a performing arts nonprofit, and you want to find your rock star supporters by searching for supporters who last year purchased more than 3 tickets to your performances, and also showed support by either giving at least $1000, having an active membership, or volunteering. That search would look like this:

Tip! Those indented OR lines are showing you that they're grouped with the preceding criteria. So for the above example, the criteria relate like this:

Made at least 3 purchases in 2025
AND (Gave at least $1,000.00 in 2025 OR Has an active membership OR Volunteered in 2025)

Click Edit Filters to change anything about the search. When ready, select View Matching Relationships to see the updated results.

If you want to start over with a clean slate, select Clear & Start Fresh from the top of the page.

How to connect conditions for a more complex search

Sometimes a single condition isn't enough to capture the group you're looking for. This is likely the case when you're looking to combine two or more distinct groups in your search results. This is where multiple conditions come in!

Select Add Condition to add a second condition to your search, then use the AND/OR selector to define how the conditions relate to each other. As with criteria, choosing AND combines the requirements of the two conditions to narrow your search results. Choosing OR broadens the search and find relationships that match either condition.

Example: Condition #1 OR Condition #2

Let's say you're preparing a year-end appeal mailing and want to reach two distinct groups in one pass. You could search for individuals who gave between $500 and $2,000 last year (Condition 1) OR individuals who purchased event tickets last year but have not yet made a donation this year (Condition 2). Any relationship that matches either condition will be included.

Working with "special settings" for households and archived relationships

At the bottom of the search builder, the Special Settings section gives you two additional controls that work as a final filter on your search results.

Archived relationships

This setting lets you control whether active or archived relationships are included in search results.

Exclude archived (default): Only active relationships appear in results.
Include archived: Both active and archived relationships appear.
Only archived: Results show only archived relationships.

For more details about archiving, see How to Archive a Deceased, Out of Business or Inactive Relationship.

Household expansion

Check Include all household members of matching relationships to expand your results to everyone in the household, even if only one household member matched your search conditions. This is useful, for example, when you want to email all individuals in a household rather than just the one who triggered the match—particularly since many households are set up to credit giving to the primary household member. To learn more about households, see How to Use Householding.

How can I customize the columns displayed for my search results?

By default, search results display city, state, country, and lifetime financial totals alongside each relationship's name. But depending on what you're trying to find or analyze, different details may be more useful.

To change which columns appear, click Choose what information you'd like to display above the results table.

Columns are organized into three categories:

Basic Information: Type, email, address, city, state, country, date of birth, and more
Financial Activity: Contributions (this year, last year, and lifetime), purchases, and spending
Custom Attributes: Any custom attributes your organization has defined for its records

For example, if you're pulling a list of donors to prepare for a phone-a-thon, you might swap out the address columns in favor of a phone number field. Or if you're reviewing giving trends, you could display this year's and last year's contribution totals side by side.

A couple of things worth knowing about how your selections are saved:

For ad-hoc searches: Your column choices are remembered locally in your browser, so your preference will be retained the next time you search. They won't change what is displayed for other MonkeyPod users in your organization.
For saved searches: Your column configuration is saved along with the search itself, so it's restored automatically whenever you load that search.

How can I save a search to run again in the future?

If you've built a search that you know you'll want to run again in the future, you can save the search so that it's easily accessible from the Relationships menu or the Advanced Search interface when you need it next.

Once you've run your search, choose the Save This Search button to name and save the search. Keep in mind that saving a search saves the instructions—the criteria and conditions you've set up—not the results themselves. Each time you run a saved search, it will return up-to-date results based on your current data. Your display column choices are also saved along with the search.

Tip! Saved searches are shared across the entire organization, so any search you save will be available to your MonkeyPod coworkers as well. You can also use a saved search as the basis for a Smart Email List, so your mailing list stays automatically up to date as your data changes.

Where to find saved searches

Use the Load Saved Search button at the top of the Advanced Search screen to run any of your saved searches.

Your saved searches are also accessible directly from the Relationships menu. If you have more than 15, only the first 15 alphabetically will appear there.

How can I delete, edit or rename a saved search?

Once you load a saved search, you'll see an edit icon and a trash can icon next to the name of the saved search at the top of the search screen. Use edit to rename the search. Use delete to delete the search.

What options do I have for working with search results?

The following options can be used to quickly perform an operation on the whole batch of relationships in your search results. The options appear as buttons above the search results. Just click any button to kick off the process!

Export Details: Choose the data you want to include in an export of the found records. The export is sent to you via email.
Subscribe To Mailing List: Subscribe all of the found relationships that have an email address to an email list that you choose. This bypasses any opt-in/confirmation for the subscription. Be sure you have permission to subscribe these people!
Record A Bulk Interaction: Planning on sending a piece of direct mail to everyone in the found set? That would be a good example of when you'd want to record an interaction for the whole group.
Add to Pipeline: Add everyone in the found set to a cultivation pipeline.
Assign A Role To All: Assign a role to all found relationships.
Add As Campaign Prospects: Add all of the found relationships to the Campaign Tracker. (This is only an option if you have the Campaign Tracker app installed.)

You also have the option to create a Smart Email List from saved searches using the Create Smart Email List button in the search builder. Check out How to Create Smart Email Lists Based on Saved Searches for details.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I clear out my search criteria and start a new search?

Yes! Just click the Clear & Start Fresh button at the top right of the page, and you can start with a clean slate!

How can I use advanced search to help me print mailing labels?

Easy! Run the search to find the relationships that you want to include in your print mail campaign. We suggest including the Location criteria Street address on file so you don't include any relationships that are missing that important detail. After you've got your relationships listed in the search results, click Export Details and select just the fields you need for the mailing labels. (Note you can choose to use the household name or primary household member's name in the export.) MonkeyPod then emails you the .csv file that can be used in a mail merge with Microsoft Word, or whatever program you use to print your mailing labels.

Can I search for someone based on their phone number?

The Advanced Search is set up to help you find multiple matching relationships based on complex criteria. If you're looking for an individual person based on their phone number, use the simple search in the Relationships menu instead—just start entering a phone number and matching relationships will appear in the list.