Hi All:

We just converted from GMP and I'm wondering if we are setting up organizations correctly.  Right now, we set up a record for an organization, then create a relationship with a primary contact.  Do you have a better solution?  The reason I ask is that I can't use the RE mail merge feature's fields to run letters that address the organization's primary contact.  Do you have a workaround you use?

Alternately, is it possible to open up the field choices within the mail merge function so that I can select exactly the fields I want on my letters, or must I continue to export data and merge within Word?

I guess what I'm asking is how do you run thank you letters for both individuals and corporate gifts?

Thanks!

We also have organization records that contain relationships for contacts.  Because we have multiple contacts at most organizations, we have created a couple of different contact types (Primary, Newsletter, Special Events, etc.).

When we run our thank you letters, we use the Mail tab, Donor Acknowledgement Letters, where we have created a mail set called Daily Donation Letters. Under Fields to Include, we include the Addressee and Salutation as well as the Organization Name, so we can run thank yous to individuals and to organizations in the same process.  Under Org. Address, Step 1, we Mail to Contacts; Step 2, Contact Information, we choose one or more contact types that should get gift acknowledgement letters.

From there, we Send to Word merge wizard, Perform a conditional mail merge using multiple documents, and then make the Letter field our conditional field.

It took a while to get all this set up in the first place, and was a bit of trial and error until it worked, but now that it is set up it's easy to run and saves us many hours of work every day.  All we do is upload new Letters as needed under Configuration, and add them in as new conditions into the Daily Donation Letters.  This way we can choose the appropriate letter at the same time that we are entering the gift, and run letters for all unacknowledged gifts at one time.

 I'm a recent convert from GMP, also, and I'm running into Organization "issues".

Do you link your primary contacts to their individual record, if they are in your database as an individual donor?

I'm running into problems with that, esecially with the salutations if I have primary addressee on the individual record set to be both the husband and wife. 

~Paula

We run ours as Stephanie described.

We do link our org contacts to their individual records.  I also ran into the addressee/salutation including spouse problem.  Learned this was because we had set up our primary addressee and primary salutation to be "Mr & Mrs..."  We are actually working on changing that so individual primary addressee is just one person and moving the "Mr & Mrs" address to an additional addressee and formatting several other ones.  I wish our consultant/trainer had told us about this issue.  We could have set it up better from the beginning.

I save the letters after merging them in mail.  I've worked around it by doing a quick search or look at the addressee/salutation in the letters and edited them as needed.  This works for me as I'm not usually dealing with huge #s of letters at one time.

 JoAnn Strommen

I'm having an issue where the organization was brought in as a constituent with the business address and the employee was brought in as a constituent with the business address as the home address. I have changed all of those to business rather than home, but I still have the challenge of the organization and the employee both receiving the mailing when we send something out to all constituents. If we change these employees to contacts, will the mailing come out just once if I choose "Mail to Contacts" in the mail function, or will they both still mail? When you mention about linking the org to the individual records, do those records share the business address as the primary address, or does the individual have a separate, say home, address for their primary contact?

Thanks