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

 Our individuals have a separate address (home) unless for some reason we don't know any other besides the business address.  Some prefer to receive mail at work so if we mark that as preferred.  

Generally we send a letter to the business/organization and to the individual if both are donors.  But I know in RE you don't need to.  This knowledge base solution covers how to just have one letter:  You can even chose which key indicator: org or individual.

----

JoAnn

Wow. This is exactly the topic I logged on for, with a slight rabbit trail. I am not at the mail stage yet and need to enter many organizations and people associated with them that many staff are giving me.

Any best practice as to whether I enter the company with a relationship to the individual or the individual with a relationship to the company?

I am trying to anticiapte what people will want to pull out for mailings. We also have several types of contacts. Have you been able to do pull a query with, say, three different types of contacts?

Have you had luck or is it easier or harder to call up constituents using the "position" field instead? i.e. a school nurse, doctor, or physical therapist could be a contact type or a position.

Any help would be appreciated as I'm sure you know the blank stares from staff implying "Why is this so difficult? I just want them to get a newsletter!" Thanks.

 I am also not at the mail stage yet and would like to know if there is an easier way to input the primary contact?  Also, is there a way to show so we can easily see the primary contact in the first tab that opens when you first access the organizational record, or do you always have to go to the relationships tab  to view them?  You would think this would be easy to do....

Thanks.

Re: seeing the primary contact when accessing the record 

You can display the name of your contact with the organization name at the top of record.  Don't know of any other way to move it to bio1. 

Open any record, select "Tools" >>User Options>>Records>>Organization Title Bar, click "include contact name"  You also have the option for how to display name.