Conditional Mail Merge for Acknowledgements with Multiple Conditions

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Monique Cunningham Sims
Monique Cunningham Sims
Eighth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Socialite Level 2
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
Greetings,


I am trying to set up a conditional mail merge for our acknowledgement letters and am experiencing difficulty with multiple conditions. For example, within one of our letters, I need to include a specific text statement based on what the fund code is for that gift. We have over 2500 funds which is making this extremely difficult. Unfortunately fund id and fund description are the only fields related to the fund that are linked to the gift records. Does anyone else have a workaround for a similar issue? I'm trying to resolve the issue without having to require our gift processors to add a gift attribute to every gift. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


Monique
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  • Jen Claudy
    Jen Claudy
    Tenth Anniversary 1,500 Likes 1000 Comments Name Dropper
    I don't generally run things like this directly from RE; I prefer to export the data and then use a regular old Word Mail Merge.  Partly because a former boss of mine was correct when he would always say that an RE canned report (or in this case Mail process) will do everything you want until the very last piece.  If you are able to move your templates out of RE and use RE Export rather than RE Mail, you can then Export Fund Category or a Fund Attribute and use that in your merge fields.


    Another option would be to use a Query and Global Add to put a Gift Attribute on the records as needed, instead of having your gift processors need to do it.  Depending on whether you can Query appropriately to make this a feasible option.
  • Aaron Rothberg
    Aaron Rothberg
    Eighth Anniversary 500 Likes 100 Comments Name Dropper
    Hi Monique-


    If you can use Export to generate your letters (which I would recommend) this is pretty simple to do using Word If...Then...Else statements. Add an If...Then...Else statement looking at the Fund Id of the gift. If the Fund Id equals this special fund you're interested in, print your block of text. If a gift is not going into that fund, the text block won't print.


    Like this:

     
    65c5463555ad7ce683b7e7c323478392-huge-if



    In theory you could include 2500 diffferent If...Then...Else statements so that each gift to any fund gets a block of text unique to that fund. I wouldn't do this, of course, as it would be a management nightmare, but hopefully you see how you can leverage Word conditional statements in Export to make text display/not display based on whatever conditions you define.
  • Kim Roesing
    Kim Roesing
    Tenth Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic 5 Likes
    I can think of two things that you can try but with 2500 funds they both would be time consuming to setup.  You can code the gifts with a letter code then for each fund create a letter and the one that matches the fund will pull in the merge. 


    We are about to venture into custom wording so the letter code will stay the same but, then I wrote a nesting formula in the Annual Fund letters that looks at the type of Annual Fund and places the wording appropriate for the fund into the merge.  You can only do a nesting formula so far, I can't remember exactly how many conditions you can put in, I think under 10, but if you could group the letters in your conditional mail merge using the letter code that would help.
  • Melissa S Graves
    Melissa S Graves
    Ninth Anniversary 500 Likes 500 Comments Photogenic

    Monique Cunningham Sims:

    Greetings,


    I am trying to set up a conditional mail merge for our acknowledgement letters and am experiencing difficulty with multiple conditions. For example, within one of our letters, I need to include a specific text statement based on what the fund code is for that gift. We have over 2500 funds which is making this extremely difficult. Unfortunately fund id and fund description are the only fields related to the fund that are linked to the gift records. Does anyone else have a workaround for a similar issue? I'm trying to resolve the issue without having to require our gift processors to add a gift attribute to every gift. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


    Monique

    So do you truly expect to have 2,500 versions of this letter? Or do you have similar type funds where the language would all be the same? Can you simply use letter code and then simply use fund description as what gets "dropped in" on that certain letter code version?

  • Monique Cunningham Sims
    Monique Cunningham Sims
    Eighth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Socialite Level 2
    Thank you all so much for the feedback! I think the best option is to include a step in our gift processor's procedure to apply a 'Gift Attribute' to the gift that indicates what type of fund it is for. I also think it would be a good idea for BB developers to allow the 'Fund Category' field as a field to include in donor acknowledgement mailings. Again. thank you all so much!


    Monique
  • Gracie Schild
    Gracie Schild
    Ancient Membership 100 Likes 100 Comments Photogenic
    This might be too simple, but if the Fund has a name that is printable, why not just insert that? Of course, if it's all number and codes and abbreviations, then you'd have to go with the kind of solutions all the others have stated. At my last job, the Fund ID was a number, but the name was written out and we inserted the field into the letter. 


    Gracie Schild

    Bluebird Business Services

    Santa Fe NM
  • Melissa S Graves
    Melissa S Graves
    Ninth Anniversary 500 Likes 500 Comments Photogenic
    Sometimes people want to include content relevant to that fund into the letter. I think this is what they are looking to do.

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