Hi everyone,
Does anyone upload acknowledgement letters to Tessitura via Infomaker? Do you find it helpful or a bit of a pain? We don't change our letters often and are hoping to use it. Raiser's Edge had a similar feature that made it easy to generate letters and merges directly into Word. Any workarounds from other organizations that have gone from Raiser's Edge to Tessitura?
Thanks!
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!
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.