At the last NYC TUG meeting I realized that, for physical mailings, we at New York City Center seem to merge differently from other organizations. How do you send mail to your donors?
If we are using a List Manager list, we run User Defined Format from a List, which matches a list against an output format. We use an old custom format called City Center Card, save it to Excel (or merge it directly), and then use it as the data source for a mail merge in Microsoft Word.
We also use the output of some utilities like Print Acknowledgement Letters, Membership Renewal Notices, and Pledge Billing to merge for other mailings.
However, the organizations I asked use Execute an Output Set instead. They have an output set with name/address/etc. and merge that to their letter templates.
Is this the best way to do this? We have some information we'd like to add to our mail merges, but maybe it's better to recreate everything as an output set rather than as a new format.
-- Mike
PS: Have any of you sent physical mailings based on the more advanced Extraction Manager options like multiple addresses for the same person or sending to an affiliated individual based on their employer's address? This information isn't pullable from List Manager so do you have to extract to a file and then use that file?