Conditional Memorial Tribute Letters for Acknowledgees

Christopher Smythe

I am attempting to create a conditional mail merge that allows me to output two letters based on whether or not the acknowledgee is the constituent that the tribute is under. For instance: Jack has donated in honor of Sarah and her mother Jane is listed as an acknowledgee as well as Sarah. Is there a way to output the following variation. Dear Jane A gift in honor of Sarah has been given by Jack Dear Sarah A gift in honor of you has been given by Jack I am unaware of any variable that I can use for the conditional mail merge to delineate between an acknowledgee, and an acknowledgee that is the recipient of the tribute. Thank you for any help that you can provide. Chris Smythe Ronald McDonald House Charities of Wichita

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE

Christopher Smythe:
I am attempting to create a conditional mail merge that allows me to output two letters based on whether or not the acknowledgee is the constituent that the tribute is under. For instance: Jack has donated in honor of Sarah and her mother Jane is listed as an acknowledgee as well as Sarah. Is there a way to output the following variation. Dear Jane A gift in honor of Sarah has been given by Jack Dear Sarah A gift in honor of you has been given by Jack I am unaware of any variable that I can use for the conditional mail merge to delineate between an acknowledgee, and an acknowledgee that is the recipient of the tribute. Thank you for any help that you can provide. Chris Smythe Ronald McDonald House Charities of Wichita

You could use an If Then statement in the Word document itself, something like this:

Dear Jane, A gift in honor of [If {Tribute Constituent ID} = {Acknowledgee Constituent ID}, "you", {Tribute Addressee/Salutation}) has been given...]

Not sure of the exact syntax but can find it for you if you need it.  It's been a while since I've had to use it.

Wayne Pozzar

Josh Bekerman:

You could use an If Then statement in the Word document itself, something like this:

Dear Jane, A gift in honor of [If {Tribute Constituent ID} = {Acknowledgee Constituent ID}, "you", {Tribute Addressee/Salutation}) has been given...]

Not sure of the exact syntax but can find it for you if you need it.  It's been a while since I've had to use it.

Josh gave the right answer, you will have to use a conditional statement in the merge document.



Dear { MERGEFIELD Acknowledgee_name },



A gift in honor of { IF { MERGEFIELD Tribute_Constituent_ID } = { Acknowledgee_Constituent_ID } "you" { MERGEFIELD Tribute_name } } has been given...



Disclaimer: the mergefield titles will be different based on your setup



but it's not that easy of course...



To see the "Field Codes" as they are called in Word you have to type Alt-F9. That will show you the {} style notation. Then you have to know that the curly braces in these codes are special and MUST BE ENTERED WITH CTRL-F9.



I cannot stress this enough, copy and pasting WILL NOT WORK. You have to actually do Ctrl-F9 each time you want to add a set of curly braces. You will have to retype what I showed above using this method instead of typing the curly braces.



Finally here is a link to the MS help page about field codes. They are a pain but they work! Microsoft Word Field Codes