I am trying to send out letters to all of our donors to our last capital campaign asking them to verify how they want their information listed on the new donor wall.  I used a Donor Category Report to get all the names in the different categories and the total amount that each donor gave.  The letter, to begin with, is set up in the traditional way of date, address block, salutation.  The body of the letter is generic, thanking them again for their donation and asking them to verify the info at the bottom of the letter by a certain date.  Now this is where I'm having trouble:  at the bottom of the letter, I want to list the category they are in (i.e., $500 - $999) and then a secondary salutation set up specifically for this campaign. 

 I've tried using quick letters but am unable to use a 2nd salutation.  And I have yet to find anything where I can pull their specific category.

 Any ideas?

Thanks for everyone's input and help.  Without it, I'm looking at doing this manually for several hundred letters!

For something like this it would certainly be nice to be able to pull a second salutation. Haven't seen that in the mail merge functions.  You may need to do an export of data to excel/access to get the second salutation.  (Haven't tried to export a donor category other than one from attributes so not sure if that's available for export. - Sorry).

Hope someone else may have a work around for you. 

When you pull your category report, create a query from the pull.  Then use Export (not Quick Letters) to gather the information you need.  Export to Excel or CSV and merge in word.  Then again using the query, create an action for the mailing. I know you can get a secondary salutation this way, but I am not so sure about the category -- that might have to be manually entered.  or do an seperate export for each category and  change the wording on the letter or add a column accordingly .

Latrelle - Are you saying you want to use a different add/sal than who you address the letter to? Why wouldn't you address the letter in the same way that you list them on the donor wall?

We don't use donor category for our recognition groups - we use attributes to manage this (makes querying easier). Recognition is free and this way you can handle all of the one off situations that arise such as a January gift meant to be in December of the previous year, etc. I am going to assume you do recognition based on accumulative Gifts for a time period as opposed to per gift (Per gift you could use Gift Attributes to track recogntion)

You need to create your Second Salutation (I call mine Publish - you may want to add the Name of the Campaign to it) If you have a lot of Org donors you may need to keep their Publish filed in Notes or soemwhere else to manually edit if their Legal Business Name is not how they want to be recognized.

You can Globally add the Constituent Attribute for each donor category by using queries and then use that Attribute as the merge field.

I would definitely not use Quick Letters - I would use Export so you have all of the fields you need in order to populate the letters.

Hi Tracie:  Sometimes the letter might be addressed to, say, Dr. and Mrs. Steve Burk with the salutation as Dr. and Mrs. Burk, but the donors may want their names on the donor wall listed as "Dr. Steve and Mrs. Latrelle Burk" or "Steve and Latrelle Burk" or "The Steve Burk Family" or "Steve, Latrelle, Sean, Delaney and Gavin Burk" or "Steve and Latrelle Burk in memory of Arlen Burk" or "Burk Family Industries and Steve & Latrelle Burk" or . . . well, you get the idea.  :-)  So we set up a seperate, secondary salutation to accomodate these requests.

I get it....we made the decision earlier this year to change our Add/Sals to reflect whatever donors told us they wanted their Honor Roll listing to be. Obviously, it wouldn't work for the "In Memory Of" or "Family" situation. Good luck finding a solution!

 You won't be able to get the actual donor categories that your donors fall into. Those are calculated on the fly when you run the report.

laura