We've been using the Appeals tab of the Constituent record to track all mailings that the donors received, including non-solicitation mailings.  When we add the non-solicitation mailings this way, then that appeal is then a choice to be entered on gifts, even if it shouldn't be.  I can Inactivate the appeal if necessary, but when we are doing a recurring mailing, we have just been adding packages under that appeal instead of adding the appeal for only one mailing that won't receive gifts.  I don't want to have to inactivating and re-activating the appeal, but the Gift Processors occasionally add the non-gift appeals to gifts, which requires later cleanups.  I'm trying to determine whether there is a better way to track the non-soliciation mailings - some of these go to as many as 30,000 donors, so it is a large list.

 How do you track the solicitation and non-solicitation mailings you send?

Couldn't you use actions to signify these cultivation/informational mailings were sent?  We just began implementing some regular non-solicitation mailings and I planned to add actions.  I'd like to hear if anyone has comments on this method.

We use a constituent Action for general, non-solicitation mailings.

How large are these mailings?  Some of ours our approximately 30,000+ records.

Thanks

The number doesn't matter, although ours are typically between 1,000 and 30,000.  Just gloablly add an action after the letter is sent.

I need some help on this same issue.  My organization is having the same discussion about whether to use actions v. appeals to track mailings to constiutents.  We really want track a few things:  1.  who received the mailing and what letter type.  2. did they respond to the mailing with a donation 3.  How many mailings has a person received without a response - ie a donation.    4.  what is the response rate for each segment. 

I envision using actions to "tag" the records that a mailing was sent on X date and with X letter.   I would then use an appeal code that corresponded to the mailing. 

Another person on staff, thinks that we should only use the appeal to track everything.  She would like us to track the different segements by using the package field, although the package is the same except for the letter, so there would be no way to know what package was sent unless I go to the appeal tab before doing data entry.  

I think her method using appeal only is cumbersome and could lead to inaccurate results for the above outcomes. 

Am I missing something.  What do you think? 

I use actions to show when mailings are sent whether they are solicitations or merely information/newsletters etc.

My new questions is: How/where would I create a follow-up in RE that will show that we sent this letter on 3/5/09 and we asked for $x and then we received $x on DATE; or a follow-up call was made by NAME on DATE? So that we can track the asks?
Is there a way to integrate the query/export that we used to create the merge file for the letter with an action or proposal? Where would you put this information?

thanks

Angela - I would suggest your organization uses the appeal +package codes on the reply device to track your responses to a solicitation. (Example: 09S-U-NFR = 2009 Spring Unrestricted Non-Forum Renewal  09S-U is our appeal NFR is the package)

We exclusively use reply devices to track all of our solicitations - If a donation comes in without a reply device - I don't consider it in response to a particular solicitation and it gets coded appropriately. (I wouldn't have data entry folks go look under appeal to see what the last solicitation was - however it can be done without 'losing your place' during gift entry.) There are some places that would consider the last appeal sent to be the one the donor is responding to.

There are some donations (appeals) that come in without reply devices pretty regularly that we code appropriately like Memorials & Tributes, etc.

This is what appeal is for.  Actions do not have a way to be linked to a gift but the functionality is built into appeal.  I would recommend only using action for non-solicitation communications due to this limited functionality.

 We recently sent out a mailing and tucked an appeal envelope into some, but not all, of the packages. We ran two separate queries and made them static to capture the groups. Then the group that received the envelope were globally added as an Appeal; the group that did not receive the envelope were globally added as a mailing Action. This worked well and captured what we actually did...appeal to some but not to all (as it were...)

We have been deliberating this very topic recently. We have a number of Affinity Partners that we work with that we would like to track the correspondence they send to our alumni (approx. 140,000). Currently we have in total approx. 2 million action records in Raisers Edge and have noticed some performance degradation with adding actions to constituents, so we are a bit hesitant to add large volumes of actions. However, as noted in many of the responses, non-solicitation mailings are more suitatble to tracking in actions rather than appeals. So while it is more desireable to use Actions to track non-solicitation mailings we may have to look at appeals to work around the performance issues (We are on 7.83.1622).

As with many of you, we are beginning to track non-solicitations. I attempted my first use of Actions today and didn't see a way to see, at a glance, what was being sent or what a meeting was about. First you choose meeting, phone, etc. Then I have several drop-downs like Follow-up meeting, Request for Sponsorship, Introductory Letter, but I would like 8 words of more detail so that when, a year from now, the Actions tab had 20 items on it, I can find quickly which meeting letter or note I want. Any ideas? I have been using the Notes field thus far. 

 If you mark the action category to "Mailing" you can then enter the name of the document that was mailed on the "Document" Line (i.e. "Optometry Newsletter- Fall 09" or "2009 President's Address to Alumni").  As long as the document naming conventions are consistent this filed is easily searched.

Hope that helps...