Creating Mass Mailings

(This option is not available with the free Lite version of DONATION.)

Using Letters à Mass Mailing, you can create letters for all Donors, or for a selected group of them. They can include just Donor information, or also include information on the individual donations for each donor (within a specified range of dates), on the total donations for that donor (within a specified range of dates), or on a specified range of receipts.

If you have not yet done so, please first read about creating letters for one donor, because this option builds strongly on that one, with most the controls in its window being the same.

There are several training videos on Mail Merge letters and receipts on the Demos and Samples web page, if you would prefer to see these features demonstrated live, rather than reading about them.

Before you can use this feature, you need to have a document that will form the basis of the letter. The documents used by this option are exactly the same as the documents used by the One Letter option. (This is a change that started in version 3.10 of DONATION. In prior versions, separate letters with different types of merge fields were used for the two Letters menu options.)

Type of Information Options

The following are the options for Type of Information in in the Merge Letters window that comes up when you use Letters à Mass Mailing:

Steps to Create a Mass Mailing

When you select Letters à Mass Mailing, the following window comes up, which you will see is very similar to the one for Letters à One Letter, but with the addition of the new sections 2 and 3:

Note: As mentioned in the topic on Creating Letters for One Donor, the 6th option in section (1), "Gift in Kind Receipt information" only appears if you are in Canada and you have selected "Use different receipts for Gifts in Kind / Non-Cash Gifts" under the Maintenance à Receipt Options menu option. And the 4th option, "Pledge information", disappears if you uncheck "Annual Pledge" in the Show Fields area of the Donor Details tab of the Maintenance  Main Window Options window.

In section (1), you select the type of information to be merged into the letter, from the list above. The specific fields that can be merged in for each type of information are listed in the list box at the right. You don't do anything with the list at the right - it is just for information.

I will skip sections (2) and (3) in the window for now, because they are not usually used. There are sections further down on this help page about them.

Sections (4) is used just like the almost identical section (2) in Merge One Letter, to select and optionally edit the Letter File with the merge codes in it. This is described in detail in creating letters for one donor.

Click on the Merge button to do the merging of the letters.

If you are using the Individual Donation information or Total Donations information options, when you click Merge you will first see a "Select Dates for Mail Merge" window. That allows you to specify a range of dates within the current year, so that only donations within that range of dates are included in the merged data. This allows you to do things like letters for all donations received in the last week or month (for Individual Donation information), or quarterly report letters to your donors (for Total Donations information). The default for this window is from January 1st up to the current date, which may often be what you will want.

If you are using the Receipt information or Gift in Kind Receipt information options, when you click Merge you will first see an "Enter Receipt Numbers" window in which you select the range of receipt numbers you want to recreate via mail merge. If you aren't sure which receipt numbers to select, you can exit this option and use Reports à Receipt à All Receipts to see a list of all receipts that have been generated in the current year.

Once you have made these selections, the internal editor window will appear, briefly display the Letter File, and create all of the letters or receipts, filling in all of the merge fields with the appropriate data from your donors, donations and/or receipts, depending on which Type of Information you selected.

Page breaks between individual letters are shown with a light grey horizontal line across the page, with the words "Page Break" in the middle of it. That line does not print when you print the document. It is just a visual indicator of the hard page breaks. (If individual letters are longer than one page, the page breaks within them, normally called soft page breaks, are not shown. You can use File à Print Preview in the internal editor to see the real pagination.)

You can make editing changes in this merged file if you want, for instance to further personalize the letters or receipts. If you wish, save those changes with File à Save.

Then, just print the letters with File à Print, the Print toolbar icon in the editor, or Ctrl+P. For Receipt information merges, you will be prompted to print a 2nd copy for your records. Finally, exit the editor window to come back to the Merge Letters window. You can also optionally email the letters or receipts to those donors who have email addresses (and print the rest if you wish), with the File à Email/Print menu option or the Email toolbar icon.

If you are done, click Close to close that window and go back to the program's main window. Or, you can do more merge documents.

Filtering or Reviewing Information Before Merging

In section (2), you can check a checkbox labelled "I want to filter the information before doing the merge". If you check this, you will be shown the selected information for all donors in a window similar to DONATION's reports viewing window, after you click on Merge. From that window, you can click the Filter button if you wish, and enter filter criteria to determine which of the donors (or other selected information) should be included in the mail merge. See the section on Filtering Reports for more information on how to use this. You can also use the Sort button on the filtering window to sort the information into a different order, if you want the letters or receipts to be printed in a different order from the one I designed into the program.

Using this checkbox option and window can also be helpful just to see the information that will be merged, before you do the merge, even if you have no need to filter or sort it further.

You can also click a Save SQL button in this window, to save the SQL command that was used to retrieve this data to a file. You could later retrieve that SQL, in the Database à SQL Select window, for your own uses, such as exporting the data for use in your own mail merges using your word processor. (However, see the next section on this page for a more direct way to do that.)

Click OK in that window when you are satisfied with the data, or Cancel if you decide you don't want to create merged letters for the displayed data.

One example of when you might use filtering is if you have had a special campaign, and all donations for that campaign have been entered with a certain donation category, say "Special Fund". You might want to create customized thank-you letters for only those donations.

If so, first edit a letter for Individual Donation information as desired. Check the checkbox for filtering, then click Merge. After selecting your desired range of donation dates, in the window showing the selected information, click Filter. In the Filter window, enter the following:

   donationcategory = "Special Fund"

Then click OK, and the merge will be done, but including only those donations for the Special Fund.

Doing Mass Mailings in your Word Processor

If for some reason you prefer to do the mailing using your normal word processor's own mail merge features, there is an option to do so. (For instance, this is used for Generating Mailing Labels using Mass Mailings.)

If you check the checkbox in section (3), the Merge button gets renamed to Export, and you cannot use section (4) to specify the file names.

When you click Export, the same data that would be available for merge fields in the built-in mail merges is exported to a CSV (comma-separated value) file. The program tells you the name of this file. You use this file as the data file for the mail merge in your word processor. (N.B. CSV files are known to work well with Microsoft Word. I cannot tell you whether they will work as well with other word processors, but they are a standard data export format.)

It is beyond the scope of this documentation to tell you whatever you need to know about doing mail merge in your word processor. Please consult the program's documentation if you need help with that.

As mentioned, the exported data is stored in Comma-Separated Value (*.csv) files. It might be more natural to use Microsoft Excel files for the data with Microsoft Word, but it turns out that this requires you to have Excel installed, and some users only own Word. If you do have Excel installed, however, after exporting the data, you are given an option to open the exported file in Excel.

The following table lists the names of the exported data files for each type of export information. They are exported into the same directory that the letters are in, the Letters subdirectory of the Data Directory.

Type of Information        Exported Filename

Donor information only        export_donors.csv

Individual Donation information        export_donations.csv

Total Donations information        export_donationTotals.csv

Pledge information        export_pledges.csv

Receipt information        export_receipts.csv

Gift in Kind Receipt information        export_receipts_gik.csv

There are also some details on the mail merge features of Microsoft Word in the section on Doing Mail Merges using Save As from Reports.