Renewal Letters

erin russell

Hello Everyone - I have a sort of odd question about the Renewal Letters option in "mail."


a little background: I have been working with RE for a little over a year, and prior to my tenure there was one main person who ran the database for almost a decade. As i've adjusted to this role i am starting to rethink processes we have 'always done' to find improvement.


For our high level donor membership renewal letters are currently being done manually in a mail merge document using data exported (For our general level membership we do everything through a mail house). We have a new person taking over this position and they are having trouble grasping why we are doing this task as a complicated, manual and difficult process. They have asked me to explore this option in mail.


I have looked it over and it seems fairly simple and like a great option. I can see that renewals were last run in the Mail section in 2005. Unfortunately there is no one with historical knowledge that can tell me why we moved away from that process to the current manual process that has been done for the last ten years. 


I guess my hesitation to move over is that lack of knowledge as to why the process was changed to a more manual and complicated one, when there was a fairly automatic function available. So my question is this - do you use the renewal function and do you have any problems with it? have you moved away from using them in this way, if so why?


All feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

 

James Andrews

Sometimes things get taken out of the automated modules because people want information in the export that isn't available in renewals, for pre-mailing analysis or to include in their letters.  For instance renewal letters includes gifts.amount.  What amount is that? The gift attached to the membership? You can export a number of them, what number should you use?  Hard to know.  


Or maybe they want the person's total giving for last year included in the file so they can review. Or maybe sopme other piece of information in the record that isn't available, like a primary solicitor name or something. Or maybe they want an ACTUAL SORT FIELD INCLUDED IN A MAILMERGE LIST BLACKBAUD ARE YOU LISTENING.  


Or it could be many other things -- the stuff REMail does is great, with the address processing and handling organization contacts and all that sort of thing. But it does have its limitations, as any canned report or procedure does, and when you run up against those limitations, it's back to good ol' Export. 


Of course eventually you run up against the limitations of Export, and the real fun starts...

Gracie Schild

Hi - we use the renewal letters in Mail all the time.  It was a pain to set up like any letter - only worse because we include a form for them to return, and getting that to format correctly was a NIGHTMARE!!!  But now that it's there, it's a very simple process.  We actually have three letters (expiring next first of the month, just expired, expired 6 weeks ago) and we run all three of them each month.  The dates are simply updated on each to reflect the timing of the expiration.  We get around the giving amount by simply saying "current membership level" with the name of the membership and listing all of the options below on the form so they can up- or downgrade as desired. We also have the number of the renewal letter in the bottom corner of the form, so when they send it in we see which form was the most effective (we also ask for it if they renew online and they often include it, so we have the hard copy and online appeal for each of the letters).  You could easily make one letter for your higher end people and something else for the rest of your members if you decided to take the whole thing in house.  Easy for me to say, of course - we've got about 500 members!  If your list is big enough to warrant a mailing house, it may be best to leave the hoi poloi with them and just redo your major donor folks. 

erin russell

thanks everyone, all of this info helps!