Sending mail to a specific contact, with a specific addressee

Luisa Harmon

Hello everyone, I was hoping to get some ideas for best practices when sending mail to a specific contact. In a nutshell, the issue is: When a gift is received from an organization and we have spouse information for the primary contact, the letter will have the employee's name and the spouse's. I know that when you go through Export, you have the option to only mail to the head of household but I can't seem to find anything that will work this way within the Mail Tab. The solution that I came up with is to create a new Addressee/Salutation type for business contacts that is just the Employee's name. Since, for other mailings we may want to mail to the Employee and their spouse, so that should remain the Primary Addressee/Salutation. Any thoughts, best practices?

JoAnn Strommen

Luisa Montgomery:
Hello everyone, I was hoping to get some ideas for best practices when sending mail to a specific contact. In a nutshell, the issue is: When a gift is received from an organization and we have spouse information for the primary contact, the letter will have the employee's name and the spouse's. I know that when you go through Export, you have the option to only mail to the head of household but I can't seem to find anything that will work this way within the Mail Tab. The solution that I came up with is to create a new Addressee/Salutation type for business contacts that is just the Employee's name. Since, for other mailings we may want to mail to the Employee and their spouse, so that should remain the Primary Addressee/Salutation. Any thoughts, best practices?

Luisa,

Your solution to add a specific add/sal for contacts tends to be the best option when you need one individual for some orgs and several for another org correspondence.  Downside is you have to manually put in the correct format/names for each record.

Do you have an add/sal on your records for just the individual?  If so you can choose that as the add/sal to use in the mailing.  As 98% of our org letters just go to one individual I have just chosen in Mail set up for orgs to use the single informal add/sal that I have on every record.  In the fields to include you can pick whatever sal/add you want to use for the letters.  I know a lot of orgs use constit and spouse for primary; we don't - for us primary is formal individual addressee. Separate add/sal format used for including spouses. 

To change the add/sal used, in your mail go to tab 2 Fields to include.  In right pane when add/sal is highlighted click the options box to the right.  It starts with individuals, so go down to contact and then select the addressee/salutation format you want to use.  The format needs to be on the records though - can't be added through mail.

Gina Gerhard

Luisa Montgomery:
Hello everyone, I was hoping to get some ideas for best practices when sending mail to a specific contact. In a nutshell, the issue is: When a gift is received from an organization and we have spouse information for the primary contact, the letter will have the employee's name and the spouse's. I know that when you go through Export, you have the option to only mail to the head of household but I can't seem to find anything that will work this way within the Mail Tab. The solution that I came up with is to create a new Addressee/Salutation type for business contacts that is just the Employee's name. Since, for other mailings we may want to mail to the Employee and their spouse, so that should remain the Primary Addressee/Salutation. Any thoughts, best practices?

Luisa - Here is the process we follow in order to get the gift acknowledged to a specific person within an organization: - As an example, let's use Jane Smith who made a gift on behalf of ABC Organization. - Jane is NOT the primary contact; we mark her as a contact and choose 'Secondary Contact' from the contact type dropdown. - We have a relationship attribute called "Acknowledgement Contact" and enter that on Jane's record. In Mail: - We have a Donor Acknowledgment Letter that we run to produce our standard acknowledgements. - In this letter format, on Tab 7 Org Address, we choose Mail to Contacts. In the Contact Information button, we do not include specific types BUT in the Contact Attributes button, we specify to Include the attribute of "Acknowledgement Contact". This will force the selection of the contact that has that attribute. - In 2 Fields to Include, make sure you are exporting the Addressee/Salutation Addressee field and set the options for that field to choose Primary Addressee (this is the format we use that will print Ms. Jane Smith on the letter; choose whatever your definition is of that addressee in your system). - When you merge your acknowledgement letter, it will produce this block: Ms. Jane Smith, ABC Organization, address.... This way, you are forcing the system to choose whoever is marked as the Acknowledgement Contact as an attribute, so it's NOT dependent on their contact type. And it will choose that individual contact's addressee format that is for that individual ONLY, not their joint version. Whenever a gift comes in, the gift processor needs to scan to see who currently has that attribute, and potentially adjust it based on whoever is on the new gift. The attribute can be removed from the previous person and put on whoever the new person is who should receive the letter. Hope that makes sense and is helpful -

Jessica Mavaro 3

JoAnn Strommen:

Luisa Montgomery:

Hello everyone, I was hoping to get some ideas for best practices when sending mail to a specific contact. In a nutshell, the issue is: When a gift is received from an organization and we have spouse information for the primary contact, the letter will have the employee's name and the spouse's. I know that when you go through Export, you have the option to only mail to the head of household but I can't seem to find anything that will work this way within the Mail Tab. The solution that I came up with is to create a new Addressee/Salutation type for business contacts that is just the Employee's name. Since, for other mailings we may want to mail to the Employee and their spouse, so that should remain the Primary Addressee/Salutation. Any thoughts, best practices?

 

Luisa,

Your solution to add a specific add/sal for contacts tends to be the best option when you need one individual for some orgs and several for another org correspondence.  Downside is you have to manually put in the correct format/names for each record.

Do you have an add/sal on your records for just the individual?  If so you can choose that as the add/sal to use in the mailing.  As 98% of our org letters just go to one individual I have just chosen in Mail set up for orgs to use the single informal add/sal that I have on every record.  In the fields to include you can pick whatever sal/add you want to use for the letters.  I know a lot of orgs use constit and spouse for primary; we don't - for us primary is formal individual addressee. Separate add/sal format used for including spouses. 

To change the add/sal used, in your mail go to tab 2 Fields to include.  In right pane when add/sal is highlighted click the options box to the right.  It starts with individuals, so go down to contact and then select the addressee/salutation format you want to use.  The format needs to be on the records though - can't be added through mail.

 

Hi all, 


I am facing a similar problem, but unfortunately the solution above won't work because the contact to receive the letter must be determined on the gift record itself. We often receive contributions from different arms of one organization, so who receives the acknowledgment is really determined on a case-by-case basis. I thought soft crediting might do the trick, but unfortunately the soft credit fields to include in RE mail are extremely limited (you can only get to the soft credit amount). I am hopeful that someone else has come up with a clever solution to this problem! Please let me know if you have!


Thanks,

Jessica

Gina Gerhard

Jessica -


Here's what we do to handle contacts for gifts.  

• We created a relationship attribute to flag someone who should be receiving the gift acknowledgment.
• We check the person as a contact but do NOT use contact type to mark them as receiving the gift.
• Instead, we put the relationship attribute to mark that they should receive the acknowledgement..
• In Address Processing, on the Org tab you can then specify to pull contacts that have specific relationship attributes.  We set this up to pull contacts that have this acknowledgement attribute, so they will be pulled onto the letter.

Jocelyn Ferland

Using RE Data Base (not web view) my fix was to add new table entries in CONFIG, by going to Tables, Addrs/Sal Types & New Table Entry. I added one entry titled: Business Addressee and one entry titled: Business Salutation.

For mail to pull the correct entry, I updated the fields. In RE Data Base, Mail, Letters, Fields to Include, Fields to Export, single click on Addressee/Salutation Addressee, click option button: From Individual, Use this addressee/salutation if present on the Individual, choose Business Addressee in the drop down box, then below Otherwise Use, choose Primary Addressee in the drop down box.

When a spouse exists on a record, mail export will look to pull the business addressee and salutation first. As I update organization records and link relationships, I check for spouse, go to the record and update Individual Addressee and Sal to Business addressee and Sal. No more editing letters and envelopes!