Creating a Mailing List

Today’s topic in our second Foundation series is creating a mailing list. And like everything that we cover in our second Foundation series, it’s going to be building off of previously discussed topics. Today we’re going to learn more about Read More

Today’s topic in our second Foundation series is creating a mailing list. And like everything that we cover in our second Foundation series, it’s going to be building off of previously discussed topics. Today we’re going to learn more about the four keys for a successful mailing list, which would include your selection filters, export templates, the mail merge template itself, as well as where to go within DonorPerfect to create all of those. And of course, we’re also going to show you how you can record which constituents were included in that mailing by creating a contact transaction for all those folks.

So first and foremost, Hello, my name is Shawn Botero. I am the newest addition to the training team here. years prior, I was working in the support department. So if you’ve ever called in or chatted into support, this is me, this is what I look like we might have spoken before, start off with some statistics that initially when I found these statistics, it was a little surprising to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense that it made. Today’s topic is of course, creating a mailing list. Now a lot of people hear this topic and the first thing that they ask is why in this day and age 2022 Would you be focusing on physical mailings? It’s the digital age and most people are shifting towards some type of electronic communication due to its prevalence, ease of use, and the fact that it’s instantaneous, but the data actually shows that response rates to emails can be as low as point zero 5%. So for every 2000 emails that you send out, maybe one will actually be opens. Whereas studies of direct mail show that physical mailings have an open rate of 80%. That’s a huge difference. They also found that 50 56% of people that were surveyed believe that that printed material instills in them trust for the soliciting organization.

Now, when you think about it kind of does make logical sense. At least for me, when you open up an email, it’s really easy to open it, close it and forget about it entirely forever. Or maybe never open it at all, just because you get so many emails and it gets lost in the sauce. But a direct mail piece is something that you can hold in your hands and experience in the real world and hang on to it. That letter that you send to those donors, those constituents, that is a physical reminder that your organization is out there doing good work, and that your constituents that receive that mailing are a part of it.

Building off of this, this might be a little bit of a personal preference. But these statistics definitely ring true for me. Not only am I more aware of the letter that shows up in front of my house, in my actual mailbox, but it’s also true about emails, I get a lot of emails and a lot of them I really don’t pay attention to. And the same thing is kind of true for the difference between physical and electronic media. I’d rather have a physical book than read an ebook. Everybody has their preferences out there. And at least when it comes to mailings, physical letter mailings are the way to go. So keeping all of that in mind that printed materials can instill more trust in your organization.

We’re going to be going over the four keys for a successful mailing. Starting with building that selection filter to identify the constituents that should be the recipients of those mailings. And we’re going to go over how to build the export template and the mail merge template, so that you can create personalized letters quickly and easily for each donor. And we’re going to go over where you can do all of that in DonorPerfect. And as touched on earlier, we’re also going to talk about creating a contact record. When you’re creating these mailing lists, generating these letters, you can put a contact transaction on each of those records, to keep track of everything.

And a little caveat here as with all of our webinars, the contents of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. Now, this particular webinar with mail merges, everybody should have access to mail merges. But when we’re looking at individual records, you know, everything’s customizable might look a little bit different in my demo system, as opposed to what you’re seeing there.

So I think pretty much any process that you’re doing and doing or perfect. I like to think of it as starting off as some type of inner monologue inner dialogue. Ask yourself

Who do I want to include in this direct mail piece? Well, a solid place to start would be to focus on donors who are consistently generous in the past, or maybe donors who have given to a specific cause before you could solicit them to thank them for their previous support, let them know how their contribution made an impact and highlight how continued giving could continue to make an impact.

Now, it’s also always going to be much more efficient to work on the donors who all have already donated in the past and have laps they haven’t donated in a while, it’s going to be a bit more efficient than trying to bring in new donors, let’s focus on those ones that are already in there. But they lapsed, they’re in our database, where you can find them and solicit them again to bring them back into the fold of our constituency.

Also your major donors

that are out there, if you want to appeal to them for a larger act, ask direct mail is a great way to reach out to them as it feels more personal, potentially than just shooting them an email.

Now, we all know the importance of new donors, and we want to celebrate them and welcome them to our organization. Direct Mail can be a great way to welcome them. Or you can provide them with materials to get them up to speed on everything your organization’s doing your mission and the impact that their first donation made.

Quickly here, I’d like to take an informal poll using the questions box there. I just had a few examples of who to include in a mailing. If you wanted to narrow it down from everybody in your database to just a specific group. What about you guys? Who might you want to include in a direct mailing?

Array? I’m seeing monthly volunteers. That’s a good one. Sorry, your monthly donors. Certainly anybody who has

a pledge that’s donating on a regular basis, that will be a good group to focus on.

lapse donors who have given less than $1,200 per year. That’s another good one. Uh, you know, your database, you know your donors very well. And based off the data that you’re seeing, yeah, you can tailor a specific selection filter to find those folks like Elizabeth engineer laughs donors who have given less than 1200 per year, that’s something that you could definitely filter for.

So, once you have decided who you want to include in that mailing, I mean, how are you going to get them into that mailing list? Well, the answer is always going to be a selection filter. Filters are a way for you to identify the specific records that you wanted to include on the mailing list. Now, DonorPerfect has three different ways for you to build selection filters, we have your standard filters, we have compound filters, and then we have sidebar filters, which in the context of this webinar is for from a mailing perspective, the sidebar option isn’t actually going to be available in the mail merge module that we’re going to be taking a look at today. Most likely, you’ll either be using a standard filter with relatively simple criteria that your donors are meeting like a, you know, a last gift date of this year, your most recent donors. But if you have more complex criteria, you may need to combine two standard filters into a compound filter.

If you needed to exclude a certain group of donors, this will often call for a compound filter. Or if you have complex criteria, multiple criteria that you have for your list that requires that criteria to be to be combined with both ands and or statements that would also call for a compound filter. Now for simplicity sake, I am going to be focusing on a very simple standard filters here today. But I would encourage you to circle back this this webinar is being recorded just like all of our webinars. Last week, we did selection

and filters, 101 and 102. Those are recorded for your viewing pleasure. If you want to catch up on how selection filters are best used, we do have a, we do have a webinar that’s recorded just for that, that you can access for free. For simplicity’s sake, though, we’re just going to be working with standard filters here, as far as who is going to be included in our demo mailing list today.

So let’s start out with exactly that a standard filter, I’m going to go into DonorPerfect here. And before I even build that selection filter, oftentimes, what I like to do is get a look at where everything starts, just pop open a donor record, and take a look at you know, this record the fields and the values that are in it.

You know, let’s say in this example, I want to focus on donors who have given this year, or, more specifically, more accurately, donors whose most recent or last gift was this year. So I have Betsy Ross’s record open right here. And if I scroll down again, this is where things might be a little bit different for you. But for me, I have a little bit of a newer system that has all of my Calculated Fields grouped together in a section called giving engagement profile for you, if you don’t have this, all of these calculations are either on the main or the BIOS screen somewhere. But

you know, Betsy, donated recently, and we have a calculated field here, that is doing some little basic arithmetic on the back end to determine when the most recent gift date was. In the case of this person, we have a last gift date of September 1 2022. So that’s what I’m going to include in my selection filters.

Oh, somebody somebody’s asking. And because we’re still in DonorPerfect. Yeah, I can do I can mention that real quick here. Dana Dana’s asking, if you go to the question mark, bubble. And it’s sometimes it does take a second. But the very last option in this drop down menu here, Dana, we have our on demand webinars are real quickly, I’m going to pop that open in another screen. See, it does takes a couple seconds

to pop open sometimes.

Now I recorded the one I did the one the live one last week for selection filters one to one and 102. So it’s not going to be that one specifically, but another one that was recorded, it’s all the same material. So right here, selection filters, one to one and 102. Everybody should have access to this.

Alright, so I’ve identified the criteria that I want to use in my filter, your welcome data, of course. So we want to look for the last gift date of this year for this person happens to be September. And to do that, I’m going to build a selection filter. When I do that, what I like to do is I like to go to where the filters reside, I like to go to their home by going to settings, our little gear icon here at the top right, and going down to filters.

And then once I’m here, I can click on add new filter, the field I want is last gift date that’s on the main bio screen. And box two, I’ll select last gift date. And I’m looking for the last gift date to be exactly equal to this year. There’s even a little button here that I can click for this year. Alternatively, I could do separate date ranges. If I wanted, with the comparison operator between there’s several different ways to do this here. But let’s just keep it simple, looking for a last gift date, exactly equal to this year.

And that’ll be it. These are the folks that I want to include.

I’m gonna give it a name so that it will be saved. We have a bunch of filter folders here, I’m gonna put it in my webinar filter. And I’m going to check off this box to share this across all users. I want to make sure that anybody that wants to run the same mailing list has access to that same filter, save yourself a little bit of trouble, no need to remake that same filter over and over again. So we’ve got the selection filter. That’s the first part of the equation for the mailing list, identifying which constituents you want to include anybody who gave last this year.

The other half of the equation is going to be your export templates. And now for those of you

Who out there who have performed, mail merges outside of DonorPerfect, you’re already familiar with the concept of combining a Word document and an Excel file, motion them together and merging letters in bulk. That is something that Microsoft Office can do. Take an Excel spreadsheet, take a specially formatted Word document, put them together and your output is a bunch of different letters.

We’re not going to be going over that. But all of that can be actually accomplished within DonorPerfect. And your export template. How does that fit into the equation, A your export template is essentially taking place.

taking the place of that Excel file in the mail merge. And export template at its simplest definition, is a list of columns that you want to see in the Excel file where each column is a separate field. And their purpose on the subject of creating a mailing list is that it lets you select the fields of data from DonorPerfect that you want to incorporate into your letter. This is how I can tell the system that I want to include First Name, Last Name, Address address to city state, zip, and the date of their last donation or any other fields that I wanted to include. If I add those to the export template, that would be the first step to make sure that they’re in there. And to do that, just like I did with filters, you’re going to be going to where all of them reside in settings and export templates. There are many ways to access export templates. That’s just the way I like to get to it. We’ll see that in a few moments here. Now when you go to settings and export templates, what you’re actually going to be doing is, once you’re there, you’re going to create a new template, you’re going to give it a unique name,

you’re going to select the type which in this case, this is going to be a pretty basic mailing with all of the name and address fields from the main and bio screen. So we’ll have a main and bio type A, you can even choose to sort the output. By default, it’s going to be last name, that’s fine, you’re going to select the fields that you want to be

in the mailing.

And then last but not least, it seems silly to include. But save and close. There is a big button here at the top of rates, that’s a save and close. This isn’t necessarily like Microsoft Word that would auto save for you. So always make sure that you’re saving and closing as you move along.

And let’s create one, let’s create one. So we have a selection filter so far, identifying who we might want to include in this mailing. But let’s create that export template. Going to go to Settings, and then export templates.

And then right here at the top left, I’m going to click on add new template. Now if I don’t give this export template a name, it’s going to be given the name my export template. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to give this a name that describes its function, how I’m going to use this and in this case, I’m going to use this template and the fields that are in it for a mailing. And I can use that over and over again. So in this case, I’m just going to call it the basic mailing template.

Now for this mailing, all the fields that are going to be included, are from the main and bio screen, it defaulted to that so I can leave that there. The order that they come out how they are sorted isn’t so important. But what is important are my selected fields. So whenever you’re creating a new export template, right off the bat, it’s going to give you a lot of the most popular selected fields,

including the ones that would be used for mailing their first name, last name, their address, and all this other information.

There’s even some additional ones that I probably won’t be including in the mailing, like their phone number and their email. But you know what, it doesn’t matter. If those extra fields are in there, it doesn’t hurt.

It’ll just skip over those if they’re not being included. But what I would like to do for the purpose of this mailing, in addition to all these basic ones, yeah, we got the name and the address for the address block. We got the salutation so that it says Dear Betsy, you know Miss Betsy Ross, when we merge these letters, what I’d also

I’d like to do here is also include the last gift date fields for this particular mailing. That’s going to be a unique field that I want to include. And it’s not here by default. But it is here from my list of available fields.

And now I could search for it alphabetically. But there’s a little search box here, where I can just look for last gift date, this is the one.

And now I could check this box and then click on the right facing arrow to add it. But what a lot of people don’t realize about these export templates is that you can click and drag, I’m going to just click and drag that over there. And now we have last gift date included.

are right, and then I’m going to click on Save and Close. And now for my list of export templates, I have the basic mailing template. I can use this for any mailings that I do ever needs to create multiple export templates. And let’s say the next mailing that I want to do, I want to add another field that’s not in there already. No need to create another one, I can just build off of this one, I clicked on that little blue edit pencil there, we still have all those old fields. But you know what, maybe for the next mailing that I’m doing in a couple of months, that next time I do it, I also want to include the last gift amount

I can just add it.

And now that field could be included as well. If the mail merge template that I’m creating has it as well, no need to create multiple export templates there.

Are right Alright, so now that you have the data that you want,

you’re going to have to have a place to use that data. That’s where your mail merge templates come into play.

We have a little bit of an example here. This will be the actual letter that has info merged into it that your donor will read. Within the text you’re going to set up, we have what are called merge fields, all of these fields that we have here that have these funny little greater than less than symbols within it. These are merge fields, we call the merge fields.

These are merge fields are where the fields from your export template are going to auto populate in the letter when you merge it. So this is where that letter document looks like. This is what that document looks like before the merge, we have a blank template with no information in it just yet.

But when you can bind that mail merge template with the export template, what you get is a personalized letter

that you can then send to that donor. Here in this example,

we have a merge with all of the information about Ms. Laura Bart, and inserted into the address block.

Now we’re going to take a step back here for a second because what almost always comes up whenever I’ve worked with clients about mail merges, they take a look at this address block and they say, You know what we don’t really nobody in our system really has a professional title.

You know, or we don’t really use address to which I hope isn’t the case, address two four suites, Pio boxes, things like that. But if you’re not using those, don’t worry about it, you can leave that there as is and it’ll just skip over it. And it’s not going to leave like a big empty blank spot, it’s simply going to ignore and suppress it.

Are right so if you’re looking for assistance, setting up these address blocks and the merge fields, we got you covered on all of that, you can actually go to our mail merge library and use one of our pre made templates that either come with your database, or you can get more of them that we’ve already created from the knowledge base. No matter where you get it from. Within Mail Merge templates, there is a option to upload new

and let’s let’s take a look at our mail merge templates here.

Go to Settings and mail merge templates.

And here are all of the ones that have ever been uploaded in my system.

We have them broken down by folders.

Let’s see, are there any ones? Here’s one like letter end of your tax merge. If you just started out with DonorPerfect today, you’ll probably be seeing some of these basic ones letter underscore, thank you, etc. Or maybe you have another one that you’ve already created and use previously, that you liked the look of, you could download it, there’s a little gray download arrow next to each of these templates. And then you could update it for a new purpose.

But what I’m going to show you is the pre made templates that we have formatted already. At the bottom right here, there’s a little link that says, looking for pre made templates. And what I’m going to do is, I’m going to right click on this link, I could just left click on it to open it, but it’s going to take me outside of DonorPerfect, and I’ll have to log back in. So instead, I’m going to right click on it and open the link in a new tab.

And then once we get here, here are all of our templates that we already have created. We have envelope templates, we have a thank you letters, we have receipt templates, we even have if you scroll down a little bit, if you have a label maker, if you’re not doing envelopes, if you’re using an Avery label maker or something similar, we have a label templates here as well. Uh, but the one that I’m looking for,

called general outreach letter, here’s the one general outreach letter on a click on that blue hyperlink. And it’s going to show me what it looks like it’s going to show me a little example. And as long as I’m moving my mouse around, I’ll see the little download option here at the top. And I’m going to download it.

That preview isn’t necessarily representative of what it looks like. But let’s pop this bad boy open.

So here we have everything that you’re going to need the address block, that’s here, we have our salutation that’s here. And then we have the body of the letter. Now you have a correctly formatted Word document that could be customized. Now there’s two ways of doing this, you could take this already functioning document, and you could type around it. To insert whatever message that you want to have in there, you can remove

this image, you can put your logo and branding certainly is important. But something else that you have the option of doing. And my apologies if you’re poor of sight like I am, I’ll expand this a little bit so everybody can see it.

That’s one way you know this, this will work for Emerg. Obviously, this is all fake demo information. And you could pop your message in here. But if you have one created already, like I happen to have here,

what you could do is you could take your version that you’ve already worked on, and zoom in here a little bit.

You could take your version that you’ve already worked on. And you could copy those working merge fields from our version and paste it into your version.

But my apologies here, let’s pop that back open.

There we go. So here we have my version that I’ve customized. It’s on brand with my other fake organization here. It looks pretty, we have pictures in there, it’s personalized, we have the president of our organization that’s in there, we have all of our colleagues listed out in the bottom, very nice, very professional looking. So what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to use this as my base template. And I’m going to take the fields from the template that I just downloaded. I’m going to do a little side by side here.

So here, I just had a little bit of placeholder text in my version for the address block. Let’s remove that. And let’s put in a working one. So I’m going to delete that.

I’m going to have the cursor where I want that address block to go.

And then in the working version from DonorPerfect. I’m going to just copy the whole thing

Ctrl C. And then in my version, Control V, presto, we have an address block. And then I’m going to do the same thing for salutation.

Going to delete my little placeholder out from there, I’m going to go to DonorPerfect version

and highlight the salutation.

And then I’m going to paste it

into my version.

There we go. So the one thing that’s missing here is

oh, you know what we don’t want to do last gift amount, we want to do last contribution on last gift date.

So I need the merge field for last gift date, this sample that I downloaded doesn’t have it. So I’m going to have to find a way to include that merge field. In my version, well, the quickest way to do that is to actually just take just grab any of these merge fields that are already working, and you can make some quick edits to them, so that they are updated for a new purpose. So let’s just take, you know, I’m gonna take salutation, I’m going to copy salutation.

Let’s remove that here. I’m going to copy salutation.

And I’m going to paste it right here. And then

let’s see, I’m going to right click on it. And I’m going to select edit fields.

Now here, here is where I have the field name that’s being used for this merge field. In this case, it was originally salutation. But what I need is what I need is the field name for last gift date. Now if you already know what that field name is for the field that you want to add, congratulations. So there’s a lot of field names that are in there. But in this case, my memory is a little foggy, I’m going to hop back into DonorPerfect here. And as a reference, I’m going to go back to my export template.

Here we go. Here’s our basic mailing template that’s there. And if I click on it, I can preview all the fields that are going to be included. And there’s a field here for the field name. If I scroll down, we can see that the last gift Date field that I wanted to add, the field name is actually last contract date. That’s what I need for updating that field. So I’m going to highlight it, I’m going to copy it. And then back in Word.

Here we go. It’s going to paste that in there. Last contrib date, and I’m gonna say okay.

Then I’m going to right click in and then select Update Field. And now I have a working merge fields that could be used in DonorPerfect once it is uploaded to the system. But because I was copying some things from another document, just a little tip here, I mean, these are different fonts and different sizes now. So I’m actually just going to copy or highlight all of this. And just make sure that we have consistency formatting here, let’s do Arial that’s slightly nicer looking

and tend to good size there. So now everything is consistent. It looks pretty, it’s functional. I can save this

and then back in DonorPerfect. I’m going to go back to where our mail merge templates are. And at the bottom right we have that big blue button that says Upload New.

From here, you can click on browse your computer, this is going to open up your file explorer. I have a

special way I like to organize these so I’m going to find that folder here.

Where did that document go?

Open this up. Let’s make sure I’m saving this in the right place

that’s why I’m gonna put it on my desktop for now.

There we go. And now that I know where it actually is in DonorPerfect when I go to Browse

here’s the one I can find it and upload it

And now for the template type, I’m going to leave it as main bio, if there were any gift fields, from the gift or pledge fields, screens, rather, I would want to select gift pledge as my template type. But because the only fields that are going to be used in this, our main bio, the template type of main bio is a okay. And again, I have the opportunity to share this with my colleagues if I so choose, which I’m going to do here.

All right, so at this point, I’ve created a selection filter that’s going to select which donors I want to include, I’ve created the export template that will be needed to dictate what fields about those donors are going to be used. And I’ve created the mail merge template, where those fields values are going to go to

there’s only one other step that you may want to consider, before you actually merge those letters, you’re going to have the option to create contact transactions for everybody who received that mailing.

Again, as a refresher, the contact screen is where you’re going to create where you can record all of your communications with that donor.

And you have the opportunity to create a contact transaction for everybody who’s being included. Now, while this step isn’t functionally necessary to perform that mailmerge to get those letters, I would encourage everybody to do this. A creating a mailing code will allow you to track all of the mailings that your constituents received. This is going to be especially valuable in the case of mailers that are focused in on solicitations. If you had a reciprocal mailing code, that is the same as the solicitation codes, you can run reports to track the success of that mailing, based on

what donations were received. Because of that, let’s say that you send out a mailing and 500 constituents are on that mailing list, and you give all of them a contact transaction that says a year end mailing. This is an old one that’s a year end mailing 2020 to any donation that comes in as a result of that mailing, you would then give a solicitation code that is the same, let’s say year end,

mailing 2020, to have them be called the same exact thing, then you can really focus in on folks who receive that mailing, and followed up with a donation to track the success of that mailing. Or you can focus in on the folks who did receive the mailing, but don’t have a donation with that same code on it. So maybe next year, you could ignore those folks save a little bit of money on mailing, or you could really double down on the folks who did receive that mailing, but didn’t donate afterwards. So I’m going to do that here. In this example, you can go to settings, and code maintenance to create that mailing code.

Then, when you are performing the actual mail merge within the mail merge module, there’s going to be a little button here that says update contact manager.

When you do that, once you merge those letters,

the mailing code that you selected, and you can even add a little comment on there as well. All of that is going to be reflected on the contact transactions for those constituents.

Now, as a side note, there is another option that you have here to track mailers that are going out. Let’s say that there is somebody who you’d like to take out of that list, you can actually export out into an Excel file, everybody who was on that list, and you can remove some of the rows, maybe you have some more subjective criteria that doesn’t necessarily fit into your filter. You could pull out an Excel file, remove those, and then use that Excel file to create your mail merge. And then you can use that same Excel file to import in contact transactions. You

If you wanted to pick and choose who’s going to be a part of this list, both of these are valid options. And they both have the same end result, updating the contact manager to create those contact transactions to keep track of everything.

So in this case, I don’t believe I have a mailing code for this purpose just yet. But let me check my contact manager. Here, let’s check out those codes. I’m going to go to settings and code maintenance. And then where it says Show Only, I’m going to click on this drop down menu and let’s find mailing code.

I’m going to select mailing code from the contact screen. And I’m going to click on go. And let’s see I want one for an end of year mailing 2022, which doesn’t exist just yet. But I’m gonna go ahead and create that right here by clicking on the Add button.

Let’s give it a short and sweet code

eoy 2022. And then the description how it’s actually going to display within a record

and of your mailing 2020 to.

Our right, so now I have a mailing code that I can use to add everybody’s record who’s going to be a part of this mailing.

All right, now it’s finally time to put everything together, we have our selection filter for who we want to mail, we have our export template with the fields that we want to include in our merge template.

And we also did some additional work that we usually advise to create those contact transactions. Now we can put all those pieces together and actually perform our mail merge.

So let’s hop back into DonorPerfect here.

And when I’m going to be doing this mail merge, conveniently, there’s a mailings icon here at the top of your screen. And from there, I’m going to go to mail merge.

Now, as fate would have it selection filters are what we refer to as being sticky. Meaning that if you create them in one place, and you move over into another area of DonorPerfect, where a selection filter could also be added. It intuitively just brings that selection filter over that’s something to be aware of. But just in case, that is not what happened for you, this isn’t always the case, I’m just going to remove it, so I can show you how to add it. That Selection filter that I’ve already built is called last gave this year. So if you go here, and you don’t have a selection filter just yet, I could also build one from here. But in this case, I’ve already created it, I built it today. Here it is last gave this year and I can click on Select.

Alright, so I have my selection filter. That would be all of my donors whose most recent gift was this year.

And then in set mailmerge options, I have my drop down menu for my export templates, where I have my basic mailing template, all set up and ready to go. Now to update the contact manager, I’m gonna have to actually click on show more options. And here it is update contact manager.

I’m going to check that off. I have a new mailing code that I want to use. That would be end of your mailing 2022. I’m going to select that. And then down here at the bottom, I’m going to click on Insert Merge.

And here’s my new

template that I recently uploaded. I’m going to select it and I’m going to click on merge and give it a few moments. The bigger the file, the bigger the mailing it might take a couple of minutes here. I know it’s a small demo system there’s only going to be a handful. If you have a you know a big group that you’re soliciting. It may take a little while to load. In this case it was pretty quick.

And here we

Have our end results, I have a specially formatted Mail Merge template, all of the information from those donor profiles is being inserted here, we have an address block here. This is a good example, let me, let me actually zoom in a little bit here.

So this would be an organization record. This is a good example of one, we have the contact from the organization, we have that person’s professional title, we have the organization’s name, followed by the address, we have their salutation here. And then we have that last gift Date field that we included as well.

Take a look at the next one. This would just be an individual pretty straightforward. We have the first name, the last name, we have the address there, we have the salutation. And again, we have the last gift date.

And so we have our actual letters, these are good to be printed out, and they’re ready to go. Now, maybe your organization has those fancy little envelopes, that has a little clear plastic window on it. So you can see the name and address that it’s going to. But if that isn’t the case, you could perform a second mail merge

to create either labels or envelopes.

So I can click on Insert Merge again. But what I’m actually going to do first is uncheck to update the contact manager. So I don’t create another contact transaction for these envelopes. Anytime we click on Insert Merge, it will create those contact transactions for everybody who’s included in this filter.

So I’m going to uncheck it. And then when I click on Insert, merge, I know I already have

one we already have, where is it? mailing envelope, this is the one, we also will have one here for those labels. But I’m going to do one here for our envelopes.

And then I’m going to merge it. And we’re going to see something very similar hair. All of that information is being merged into these envelopes.

So they can be printed out and ready to go. Here’s another example here is a individual record where we have two people living together that have different last names a good use of the optional line here

are right and let’s let’s take a look at what are those contact transactions. Betsy, Betsy should have been included in this.

And that’s being reflected on Betsy as record, I filtered for donors whose most recent gift was this year, aka the last gift date had a date of this year. So Betsy was included in this mailing. And because I chose to update the contact manager, I have this here.

And now this is a data point that could be filtered on in other reports.

So this is one way to do it. For working with a lot of clients though,

perhaps, you know, you’re comfortable with this entire process. But the logistics of printing out all of those letters. And all of those envelopes is a little too much. It’s too much ink, it’s too much paper. I know for a fact that not all printers can print envelopes, you need a specific type of printer that can take that specific size of envelope and print on it. If that is the case, then what you could do is work with a third, a third party that has a mailing house where all that company does is you know, you give them an Excel file with all the data. You give them the template that you want to merge or they create it for you. And then they take care of all of the postage, the printing and the mailing for you. And all they want from your organization is just that list of constituents who are to be included in that mailing. If that is the case, then

you’re still going to set everything up. Like this. We have our selection filter for who we want to include. We have our export template deciding what fields are going to be included.

And at the bottom left here, you

could export the mail merge file.

And what that’s going to do is that’s going to create an Excel file

with everything that that mailing house is going to need, all of, you know their name information, as well as the address information. You know, there’s some extra info that you may want to consider removing as well. But we also have those last gift fields, last gift, date, and last gift amount included as well.

All right, so that is pretty much everything for today, I see some questions popping up, I’m going to get to those. In just a few moments here. Just going to recap everything that we discussed today, you’re going to be using a selection filter, that is going to decide the folks that are going to be included in your mailing appeal. Your export template is going to decide which fields are going to be represented in your Excel file as columns. This is the vehicle through which data is merged into a mail merge template, this specifically formatted Word document that you customized just for this purpose. I didn’t mention this earlier. But Microsoft Word that is our one and only, there are other software’s out there that look very similar to word. They are imitators and we only work with Microsoft Word. So that’s worth pointing out as well for our mail merge templates.

And lastly, while you’re not required to create those contact transactions, it’s a great way of keeping track of everything, especially for reporting purposes.

All right. Any other additional questions? Dana, I see your question there. I’m going to get to that in a moment here. But if anybody else had any additional questions, please feel free to drop them into the Questions box. Reading a little bit earlier today. If you gotta hop out, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for stopping by. But let me get to some questions here.

So Dana, is asking, How can I be 100% sure that no one marked as do not send mail

will receive my mailing when I create a mailing list to send to an outside company. So let me let me go back into DonorPerfect Chair, Dana, that’s a great question actually.

So directly from the mail merge module, there’s actually some additional options that we have here that I did not expand on. But at the top here, when we’re setting our address options. If you click on show more options.

By default, it is not including those no mail addresses. So as long as you don’t check off this button, all of those do not send mail records. Anybody who has, and let me pull up Betsy, if you’re if you’re not sure what we’re talking about here, let’s find the do not send mail checkbox.

This is what we’re referring to. So if anybody has ever requested to not receive mail, you would check this box off. And that’s going to exclude them from such mailings.

Now if for some reason you did want to include them, checking off to include the no mail addresses, we’ll bring those folks in, but this is the box that you’re going to want to be concerned with your data. I hope that answers your question.

And we’re a little bit early. If anybody else has any other questions, feel free. Ask away.

All right. Excellent. Yeah. You’re very welcome, Dana. If anybody else is still typing a potential question. I’ll give a few moments for that to come through.

But if not, but if not, you can always reach out to the Support Department.

Through chat. Everybody should have access to chat. If you’re paying for our phone service, you’re welcome, Elizabeth. Hi.

via you know, thanks for stopping by appreciate it

where if you’re paying for phone support by all means, you know, give support a call if you need help with a mailing list, but I think that’s it for questions. We don’t have any more coming in. So thank you everybody. Thank you so much for stopping by today. This has been a creating a mailing list and DonorPerfect. I have been shown to Taro all of you have been amazing. Thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great day.