Slow mail merge

Megan Hearn

We switched to NXT in July, before that mail merges took less than a minute. Now they take around 10 minutes each. I have a high-speed internet from home I've been using since COVID and still have experienced the same issue whether I'm in the office or at home. Is there any fix for this?

Catherine Burns

Hi Megan. This sounds frustrating. Could you please give a little more information - When you say "switched to NXT" did you also move to Blackbaud Hosting? What type of merges are you doing - conditional or simple from Mail, or export merges? Does it happen no matter how many records there are? And where are you saving the merged documents?


Has anything else changed? Did the queries get more complex or did you add more letters to your conditional merge?


Reducing the number of options in conditional merges can help. Sometimes saving to the Blackbaud hosted shared drive or even your C drive is faster than saving to one of your shared network drives. Sometimes simplifying queries and using merges instead can help.


Personally I found that exports and mail merges were faster after moving to Blackbaud hosting but a few other tasks including running complex queries and merged queries were slower. Overall I had an improvement in performance.

 

Megan Hearn

Hi Catherine,


Thank you for your response! Yes, we switched to Blackbaud Hosting when we switched from RE7 to NXT. I am doing conditional merges, but it's really only pulling 1 letter through at a time through Mail. It takes a long time no matter how many records there are and whether I save it to our drive or the hosted drive. (Just tried again to make sure - 11 minutes to do 3 letters, saving to the hosted drive.)


The queries have not changed and are pretty simple (searches for date range, letter code & gifts marked not acknowledged).


What we ended up doing was exporting the list and setting up a template for each letter, then doing a mail merge through Word.

Catherine Burns

Hi Megan. It sounds like you are doing all the obvious things. I would definitely follow this up with the Customer Success Team who managed your move to hosting or Blackbaud Support to see if they can fix this. Simple Mail merges should not take that long. This is not standard.

Darlene Ellis

We are having the same problem. Nothing changed with the letters but it now takes us between 10 and 13 minutes just to do a batch. I ran one this morning with only 1 gift and it took a little over 10 minutes.

Lynnette Fisher

I have been having the same issue as well.