[allidejong]

Hi everyone,

I work in Development for a large nonprofit social service agency. We handle anywhere from 150-500 gifts per week.

Currently, we use mail merge to acknowledge these gifts. However, we do not use conditional mail merge. We have a query set up for each "type" of letter, with the GL date time frame as the variable. Then we use a simple mail merge for each query. Often we have six, seven queries that get used - it is cumbersome.

I am in charge of researching how to set up a conditional mail merge system, and y'all seem to know how to do this - so I'm hoping you can help me out.

I was thinking that if I sorted the letters by Campaign, then Fund, then Appeal, we could capture every letter appropriately. We have two main campaigns - our annual campaign, which goes into the general fund, and an "umbrella" campaign that captures all the regular donations, many of which go to specific programs that are designated by fund, but also some that go to the general fund (and those could be sorted by appeal). This way, I could write template letters for each condition, and set it up that way. Is this on the right track?

Would this have to happen all at once? Can I phase these changes in incrementally? Any other advice or processes/procedures to keep in mind?

Thanks in advance,

Alli deJong
New Orleans, LA

[nisaac]

I'm not sure of the best way for you, but here is how we do it. We input our mail each day as one batch. Every gift has an appeal associated with it. We have a different letter for most all of our appeals. We also have special letters for research, tribute and somea funds. We send postcards for gifts under $50. In ech gift, we use the letter field to indicate appeal letter, fund letter or postcard.

We have three acknowledgement merges: appeal, fund and postcard. In the first merge we have letters associated to the appeal and use that as the field to pull by appeal. In the fund merge, we have letters associated with the fund and pull by the fund. In the last we have our postcards.

This works great for us. Say a donor's gift comes in under the walk appeal; however, he wants it to go to one of our special funds. We can put fund letter in the letter field and it will pull the special fund letter that it noted in the gift. If we know that it is only important that we need to thank in terms of the walk, we could put the appeal letter in the letter field to get a letter that is written specifically for walk donors.

With each batch of mail we run each merge once and match the letters to the backup from the gifts. Then we circulate for review and signature.

Hope this helps.

Nora

[allidejong]

Ah, I see. This really all hinges on how we use the letter field - and the conditional mail merge can pull it that way. Thanks.

[nak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by allidejong

Ah, I see. This really all hinges on how we use the letter field - and the conditional mail merge can pull it that way. Thanks.

A conditional mail merge can work off of different fields, but if you have a complex system, it is often easiest to run it off of letters. I would just add that if you use different kinds of letterhead or if different types of letters are signed by different people, then running 2 or more conditional merges that include all of the letters in each group works pretty well.

[Melissa Siobhan]

You can use the letter field in so many ways there is no one way - you'll have to look at your own program for how you should use it.

I use it to code their relationship to us because that drives the language of the letter and the signer of the letter more than anything else for us.

So our letter codes are things like:

Auxiliary member
Board member
Employee
General Public

(I would have loved to use constituent codes for this but unfortunately these types of notes are in attributes - and more than one attribute at that so I couldn't use one code for my condition so I used the letter code.)

We then use if/then conditions within each letter to speak to fund, gift type, etc.