[BCRaven]

Does anyone email pledge reminders to donors? I'm considering establishing this as at least the first reminder for our phonathon. We have an great paper form that I use from a mail merge and I think I could HTML it for email. Has anyone had any luck with emailed reminders?
Thanks!

[ggs]

While i cant speak to the effectivness of email reminders, we do send them. We send pledge reminders to anyone who has an email address in our system and paper reminders to those who dont. The reason I cant speak to their effectivness is that our Gift Officers dont trust the emails very well and usually send a paper reminder out with in 2 weeks of the email reminder.

[BCRaven]

Thanks for the post.

How do you create the email reminders? Do you do an export and mail merge in Word/Outlook?

Thanks!
Sara Kramer
Benedictine College

[ggs]

I have not personally done one in a while, but i believe this is the process they use:
We us the mail module -> Remindes to get the export for Excel. We make sure all info we want is in there including email address (Phone type.) Once exported we separate the ones with emails from ones w/o emails. Use a third party software package to email blast reminders to those with emails. then do a Constituent Import (update) off of constituent ID to get a query of the consitutents that did not have emails and using the Mail Module again, run the reminders using this import query for the records on the reminder module. That way everyone gets something. Then like i said, after all of this, they import the email people back in and get a seperate query for them as well and send them a paper reminder a few weeks later.
Yuck, after reading it, what a pain. I dont know if there is a better way, but that is not an area that I am concentrating on at the moment so it is what it is. :-)

Hope this helps a little..

Gerhard

[Joe_Meehan]

I generate a nice looking letter with our logo, etc., and send it as a PDF via email. That way, should they need to print it out, they can, but the PDF has hyperlinks to our website where they can pay the pledge installment online, etc.

So, technically it's an email, but it's really a PDF of the letter. Kinda what BB does for Maintenence payment reminders.

Regards,
Joe Meehan

[jeff.shaw]

I know this is old but I just saw it. We just started emailing our reminders using FileMaker Pro. We use RE to create our query then export out the constituents that have an email address and let FileMaker Pro do an email merge for each record. We also include a link in the email to our online giving site. Its really a cool process!

[JeffMon]

We've created a plugin for the Financial Edge that allows an org to create rich email templates in a WYSIWYG editor and then email EFT notifications to payees, then we mark the payment as notified and (optionally) create an action on the vendor to record the details of the notification (when/who/what email address/which email template/etc). (You can see a flash demo of the plugin here.) Does anyone think something like this for RE pledge reminders would be popular? If so, please let me know.

Thanks,

Jeff