I'm sending out a mass mailing in razor's edge asking for donations. Is there a way to set the letters up in razor's edge that I can record who sends money back fromt this particular mailing?

 Thanks,

Anne Degian

I would set up an appeal and then globally add this appeal to those who receive the mailing.  Then when the donation comes in, you can "attach" the appeal to the gift.  Look on the Blackbaud knowledgebase and search on *how to globally add an appeal*.

Hope this helps.

Barbara

Thanks, I will try that.

I'm fairly new at this so I tried your suggestion, only problem is I can't figure out the flow of the whole thing.  By that I mean, first should you set up an appeal and then how do I actually do the letter to send out. 

Where do packages fit in this ?

There are tons of ways to do the letter so this is not as simple a question as you may have thought. 

I use a mailhouse so all I do is send my letter format and an exported data file to my mailhouse for them to merge.  You can also do it that way - export your data of everyone you are mailing to and use Word to merge your data into letters.

You can also go to mail and use the quick letters function.  It will perform the merge for you but may not be best depending on what fields you want in your letter.  Mail has only limited fields you can add to your letter so you should look through the fields before you decide to use quick letters.  One good feature about quick letters is that you can put your query (or even multiple queries) of who you want to mail to in the segmentation tab and have it assign your queries while it performs the merge - one step.

Mailings are not as easy as a 1,2,3 step process and deciding who to mail to and segmentation strategies can get complicated.  If you are new to this I highly suggest some training before too long.  This forum is no substitution for basic training.  We typically come in where training leaves off.

Oh, and packages are segments of a mailing.  They could be actual variations of a letter or simply groups you want to track for analysis.  I always segment my mailings by date of last gift (Current 0-12 months, LYBUNT 13-24 months, and Lapsed 25-36 months) but will also track particular groups for some mailings (former Board, volunteers, Auxiliary members, etc.) to analyze response rates and average gift size of these groups.

I completely understand what you're saying and I unfortunately went for an intense 3 day training course when I started.  Problem is, I believe I should have gone a little later when I knew a bit more about Razor's edge so I could have asked questions and understood.  I know how to do the basic quick letters but I thought I could track the responses and there was an easy way to do that.  Anyways,  I appreciate your help and thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

Anne

No problem at all.  That is usually what happens with training - even if you know what to ask the information retention rate in a 3 day class is likely 50% or less.

Tracking the responses is actually very easy with the appeal field.  You can a) put it on every record who received the mailing (pretty easily from quick letters) and b) put it on every gift that comes in from that mailing.  From that you can run an appeals analysis report to see total given, response rate, average gift, etc.  You can also run financial reports filtered on that appeal to see detail reports and lots of other stuff.  You can query on who was sent the appeal, who was sent it and did not respond, etc.  You can do a lot.

Good luck and let us know if you need any more help.

Now that you are talking about mass mailings, i have a question: How would you create a mass mailing for an appeal for constituents that have solicit codes such as DO NOT SOLICIT, DO NOT MAIL, etc. Help!

Patty Escobar:

Now that you are talking about mass mailings, i have a question: How would you create a mass mailing for an appeal for constituents that have solicit codes such as DO NOT SOLICIT, DO NOT MAIL, etc. Help!

I do not understand your question.  You would NOT create a mass mailing for people with those codes.

If you do the mass mailing through the mail function of Raiser's Edge you can filter out all those do not solicit codes and add an appeal.