Acknowledgement Letters--from Raiser's Edge to Tessitura.

Am following this as we just converted from RE to Tess. Currently, we are not using Infomaker letters, as all changes would have to go through IT as they are the only ones with access, so I'm doing everything with Excel exports so I can do a word mail-merge. We do use Infomaker for some Ack Letters (those through our ticking department), particularly for our online purchase confirmations and they get the job done, once they are set up, there is really no maintenance.

I enjoyed the RE feature of creating a quick letter - where it wasn't based on a Template but clicking it through a constituent record immediately pulled me up a word doc with the Mailing Address and Salutation automatically there. I would love to find a way to do this again.

Cheers

Aldera

Hello! We also recently converted to Tessitura from RE. We do not use Infomaker for acknowledgement letters, mainly because it is not user-friendly and we don't have a coder on our staff. 
What we've done is create our acknowledgement letters in Word, and map the fields over from the exported data. Once it is mapped, when you run your Print Acknowledgement Report you can merge the data straight from the report into your word document instead of saving as excel and then doing the mail-merge. This has saved us time. Save your mapped document as your template, so you're only doing that process once, and update info as needed. This has been a good work around for us. The only hiccup is some reports refer to the same elements by different names, particularly in the address fields, but you can easily update to the suggested field in Word that matches. 

Thanks Ashley! I think this is exactly what we have been looking for.

Aldera and Ashley,

We also have our letters in word and use merge fields to populate the data we need into the letters. We merge from Tess directly onto the template. I do know of an organization who had previously saved the excel file and then manually merged the letters into a file as part of their document storage and routing for specific messaging.

Marie

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Marie F. Kocher | Development Operations & Data Specialist

Kansas City Ballet | Todd Bolender Center for Dance & Creativity

500 W. Pershing Road, Kansas City, MO 64108

816.216.5582 (D) | 816.931.2232 x1382 (O) | 816.931.1172 (fax)

www.kcballet.org

We have too many letter types and change them too often to use Infomaker. We have all the fields mapped to a Word doc like others have said below. We save the file to Excel, add some formulas to give yes/no values based on the constituency codes, and then merge in Word. The Yes/No for things like Volunteer allow us to easily add special text without making yet another letter or manually editing every time. I'm happy to give details if you'd like.

Ann

Ann, I would love to know more about this. To be honest, I've never used yes/no values to better customize merging!

What a great little time-saver, thank you! 

I would love more info on this too!  My email is chollatz@thesmithcenter.com.

Here is a youtube video that shows one way to do "logical" if then else in MS Word Mail merge documents. 

Hi Aldera and Carol,

The video Tom posted is a good intro. Here's how we do it.

We have excel file with a bunch of fields like these we add to every saved file.

The yes/no formula looks like this: =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("SBO",AL2)),"Yes","No") It looks at the field (AL2) that contains the constituency string and gives yes, if it's in the field, No if it's not. (Excel geek stuff you don't need to know: It uses Search to find it's location, if it finds it gives a number, otherwise an error. Is Number says true or false, If says True -> Yes, False -> No.) We've also added two blank Increase and Upgrade ones the Dev Coordinator has to update.

When you're in Word add an If Then field. (You can do a basic yes/no and edit later.)

Ours look like this: { IF { MERGEFIELD M_1718_Subscriber } = "Yes" " We're pleased to have you as a subscriber for 2017/2018—your orchestra's 99th Anniversary Season is made possible with the help of devoted music lovers like you." "" } The second one is blank if they're not a subscriber.

I also use If Then for changing letter based on solicitor for our Patrons. They can get annoyingly nested but I don't have to edit all of them. I have them in name, phone, email, he/she will meet with you, and in the signature block for name and title.

Email me if you'd like to chat more! ann.true@vancouversymphony.ca.

Ann

Hi all!  The Network also has a three part video series on acknowledgments with focus on setting up a word merge template complete with conditional content.  Please feel free to check it out - hope it helps to ease the acknowledgement process!

www.tessituranetwork.com/.../Acknowledgements