I am having difficulties creating a mail merge for thank you letter and receipts for a golf tournament. People in the past did each individual letter by hand so there is no assistance from people here. Any help is appreciated. Thank you Becky Sommer Foundation and Development St. Charles Community College

Have you used the donor acknowledge letters under Mail. Its a wizard, so you can put in your dates that you entered all your batches and go from that in the area that says Include Gifts with these dates, then just walk thru each tab. Under number 3. just fill in the Fund, Appeal and Campaign and leave the rest alone. under ind address, make sure you have preferred unless it is a seasonal address, just follow all the tabs then when you are done, go to Send to word merge wizard on the top and then it will ask you to save mailing as, then hit next and go to the next page and follow the steps, when you get to the RE letter, go in and find the letter you need and copy and paste into the first, add your fields and then hit return to save and return to wizard, then hit finish and it should ask you to name your file, and then put the letters up for you. I hope that helps. sorry if not to clear.

Elizabeth Rossi

Could you specify what version of Raiser's Edge you are using please.

RE 7, what I am trying to do is create a seamless procedure than going through all the different batches created. We batch out everyday, to match with our accounting department and have over 45 batches to include in the mailing. Becky Sommer Foundation and Development St. Charles Community College

Becky, We just run our acknowledgements based on the gift date not the batch. So if you have 45 batches in one day if they all have the same gift date then you can run them together. In RE7 in Mail the Donor Acknowledgements are really easy to use once you set them up. If you need help setting them up I can help today if necessary or the week of 5/23. I am on vacation next week - Yay Me! Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804 *** Sorry my typing is not what it should be!

We have 45 batches over several days even some dating back to March. I am relatively new to RE only been working with the advanced function since March. Becky Sommer Foundation and Development St. Charles Community College

I misspoke - you can run donor acknowledgmeents on any date range you want it dies not have to be one particuar day. We just happen to do them daily. Melissa S. Graves Manager, Development Database & Direct Mail Planned Parenthood of Connecticut [Email Removed] 203-752-2804 *** Sorry my typing is not what it should be!

Sorry, should have been more specific. RE 7.4 and below do not have the ability to do conditional mail merges. I believe at 7.5 and above the ability exists. I know we have it with 7.7. It sounds like you would benifit from having the conditionial mail merge ability in the mail module. We assign a letter code on the gift as it is entered and then run donor acknowledgement from the Mail module. Within that you can set up multiple letters based on different criteria, we use letter codes, but there are other options.

On the gift there is a field that defaults to "Not Acknowledged" and the following field is a date field that is blank. When you run an mailing out of the Mail Modual you are given the choice of marking the gifts "Acknowledged". Once a gift has been marked "Acknowledged" it will never appear in a Donor Acknowledgement mailing again even if you use the date range that will include that gift. This prevents multiple mailings for the same gift.