Fund Attribute in Mail?

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Cindy Lisowski
Cindy Lisowski ✭
Ancient Membership Photogenic First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We would love to see Fund attributes accessible in Mail functions. We have begun using a specific fund attribute to store a sentence about the work of the fund, in order to more successfully customize our thank you letters. We include that fund attribute in the export for a merge, and our letters read as individually customized, which is helpful when you are acknowledging gifts to more than seventy five funds at once. Unfortunately, the fund attribute is only available in a regular export, not in mail, which means that we have to choose between highly customized letters to our donors, or the automation of the gift acknowledge function in mail.. We would prefer to have both. Any suggestions/thoughts? Thank you.
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  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Cindy Lisowski:
    We would love to see Fund attributes accessible in Mail functions. We have begun using a specific fund attribute to store a sentence about the work of the fund, in order to more successfully customize our thank you letters. We include that fund attribute in the export for a merge, and our letters read as individually customized, which is helpful when you are acknowledging gifts to more than seventy five funds at once. Unfortunately, the fund attribute is only available in a regular export, not in mail, which means that we have to choose between highly customized letters to our donors, or the automation of the gift acknowledge function in mail.. We would prefer to have both. Any suggestions/thoughts? Thank you.
    Cindy, Just a thought - yes, it would be nice to be able to get the personalization you want in Mail. Can you set your letter up as Word merge doc in export? Run the Mail function to get records marked as acknowledged and check the box for create output query. Then take the query to export and merge into the doc you set up there. It's still 2 steps and maybe what you're already doing - I just know this was a work around suggestion to a similar scenario that was posted in the forums some time ago. Don't have any other suggestions...
  • Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE
    Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    JoAnn Strommen:
    Cindy, Just a thought - yes, it would be nice to be able to get the personalization you want in Mail. Can you set your letter up as Word merge doc in export? Run the Mail function to get records marked as acknowledged and check the box for create output query. Then take the query to export and merge into the doc you set up there. It's still 2 steps and maybe what you're already doing - I just know this was a work around suggestion to a similar scenario that was posted in the forums some time ago. Don't have any other suggestions...

    Ditto to JoAnn's suggestion.  Also, depending on how many letters and funds you have you could set up the letters to insert the fund language based on the fund ID.  I only recommend this if you have a very limited number of funds and letters and are not constantly adding funds and letters.

    In the letter use an If Then statement and base it on the fund ID or fund description: If Fund ID = 12345 then "Thank you for your gift to support little Jimmy and the million of little Jimmy's just like him around the world..."

     

     

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