CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This is my first post, so thanks in advance, and please treat me as a newbie user to CiviCRM.

While I understand that automated emails can be sent out to users when they join, renew and when we wish to remind them that their membership is going to expire, I'm not to sure yet how to manage the workflow of snailmail letters within CiviCRM.

I wish to know how to manage the following:

1. Thank you letters. When someone renews their membership, we need to send them a letter of thanks and confirmation of payment.

2. Welcome letters. Every time someone becomes a member, we send them a welcome pack.

3. Renewal reminders. Those with membership expiry dates falling within a certain date get sent a certain letter.

I would like to be able to see who has been sent a letter and who hasn't, within the individual's record and by doing a smart search.

For 1 & 2, the simple way I can see of managing them is by using groups or tags, a joining/renewing prompting an individual to be tagged/grouped 'send welcome' or 'send renewal'. A saved search for those tagged individuals allows an export for mail merging. Once the mail merge is done, that group of individuals is untagged, and a record of the letter being sent attached to their account in their activity history. Most of this process I can figure, but how do I automatically tag/group members when they perform those specific actions? Does anyone have any ideas for a better/more efficient way of working this process?

For 3, CiviMember takes care of identifying those members who I need to send renewal letters to. Assigning actions (recording the mailout) to those who have been sent the letter can be done in the advanced search options. Again, does anyone use a different technique for this that will allow better control/recording of renewals? Does anyone use some kind of task management system to prompt the sending of the renewal letters on a monthly basis?

Look forward to hearing from you folks.

James.

Dave, thanks very much for your input. Still getting my head round the system.

Contributions and the 'thank you sent date' looks like a good way of managing this. I think I'll even go the extra step and manage new members with this too.

If I create different contribution types, eg Member New, Renewal Member, Subscriber New, Subscriber Renewal, I can export the whole lot of people needing letters sent to them - as 'contribution type' and not 'membership type' is present in the contribution export file.

A thankyou letter for a new member/subscriber would serve instead of using a custom field in contacts (which might end up cluttering the system up a little).

Once the export is done, I can either separate the csv into different files and merge these with different word documents or use something like this technique: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299837 to merge multiple documents from one source. Haven't tried it yet, but it uses IF arguments to determine which merge document you use. So, IF 'contribution type' = new silver member THEN merge to (eg) c:\mydocs\mergedocs\newsilvermember.doc.

Does anyone have a more elegant solution to mail merge than this?

I would go with activities Note that for online donations an activity is automatically created which you can use for your "yes" component. Based on how you generate the "snail" mail letters, you can use a hook to create an activity for all the letters generated (and hence presumed sent). Finally the "not at this time" will need to be recorded manually

u will need to check if the current activity report / activity search gives you the numbers you need for your reports. I suspect you might need to write your own custom report for this

lobo