CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

*

News:

Have a question about CiviCRM?
Get it answered quickly at the new
CiviCRM Stack Exchange Q+A site
This forum was archived on 25 November 2017. Learn more.
How to get involved.
What to do if you think you've found a bug.



  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Using CiviMail (Moderator: Piotr Szotkowski) »
  • Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
Pages: [1]

Author Topic: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members  (Read 1995 times)

Freya von Moltke-Foundation

  • I post occasionally
  • **
  • Posts: 32
  • Karma: 1
  • CiviCRM version: civiCRM 4.7.19
  • CMS version: Wordpress 4.8
  • MySQL version: 5.1.73
  • PHP version: 5.6.30
Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
September 20, 2011, 01:25:30 am
Hello,
I am a bit confused concerning the household funtion when it comes to sending mail, be it postal or e-Mail.
I know I can make household contacts share the same address with their household. What I want to do now is sending emails and postal mail to households without sending the same email/letter to their respective individuals as well. Now I know that there is this mail merge function for the mailing labels, but this still does not seem to cover the problem (or maybe I just dont know better, but thats why I am asking).
When I am generating PDF letters from a group of test contacts which also includes a household and its 2 members sharing the household address, civi still generates 2 letters for the individuals from that household AND the household. Thats 3 letters when it should have been only one addressing the household.
How can I avoid that? The mail merge function when creating mailing labels doesnt really help me here does it? Or am I just not seeing it? I am sorry but I am a bit confused here, I tried to find a way alone looking through the documentation online and the forums, but that was not successfull.
The same problem applies for Email-sending. There is no "share Email address" feature unfortunately, but is there a way civi would see that there are members of a household and the household in a mailing list and automatically decide just to send one copy of the mailing to the household email address, using the respective household greeting?

Thank you for your comments and help!

Anja

LindseyM

  • I post frequently
  • ***
  • Posts: 229
  • Karma: 8
  • CiviCRM version: 4.4.6
  • CMS version: Drupal 7
  • MySQL version: 5.5
  • PHP version: 5.3.6
Re: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
October 01, 2011, 02:33:19 pm
Hi Anja
Do a forum search on Mailing label address merging and read the comments I made along with Dave Greenberg's responses.  As far as labels go, there is currently a bug which means that 'merge by household' does not work.  We have logged this and it's due to be fixed in 4.2.

I agree with you that a 'merge by household/address' option for pdfs would be excellent - it's functionaity we need too - and it makes sense when this option already exists for exports and mailing labels (when it's working!)  Dave Greenberg made some helpful suggestions in response to my earlier post which I've copied below.  Please let me know by messaging me if you take this any further in terms of code as we're not there yet.  Thanks.  Over to Dave:

I think (some) other folks are addressing the PDFs for couples by selecting their household records and either:
1. accepting the default Postal Greeting pattern ("Dear {contact.household_name}") - which results in something like "Dear Smith Household", or "Dear Jack and Jane Smith" depending on how folks are populating Household Name.

OR

2. Populating Custom Postal Greetings as necessary when setting up household records. So you can set any value in a customized postal greeting, including "Dear Jane and Jack".

If you able to devote some programming resources to this, a couple things you can do:

1. Have one of your programmers look at the currently open "bug" on the Mailing Label merge (http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-8338) and come up with a patch which extends the mergeSameHousehold() function (in CRM/Contact/Form/Task/Label.php).

2. Submit a patch to add "Merge Same Household" option to the Send PDF Letters form.

Have them jump on IRC (#civicrm) if they want to discuss the above tasks.

markimus

  • I post occasionally
  • **
  • Posts: 75
  • Karma: 0
Re: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
October 14, 2011, 08:22:43 pm
IT appears this is broken in v3.4.5 as well?   Is there s fix for that version? 
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Donald Lobo

  • Administrator
  • I’m (like) Lobo ;)
  • *****
  • Posts: 15963
  • Karma: 470
    • CiviCRM site
  • CiviCRM version: 4.2+
  • CMS version: Drupal 7, Joomla 2.5+
  • MySQL version: 5.5.x
  • PHP version: 5.4.x
Re: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
October 15, 2011, 08:15:58 am

Currently no

If you / your org is interested in fixing the issue, please provide a patch. That would be great and appreciated by all of us

lobo
A new CiviCRM Q&A resource needs YOUR help to get started. Visit our StackExchange proposed site, sign up and vote on 5 questions

markimus

  • I post occasionally
  • **
  • Posts: 75
  • Karma: 0
Re: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
October 15, 2011, 08:27:53 am
Ok
Where should we be looking for the problem area? 
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

Donald Lobo

  • Administrator
  • I’m (like) Lobo ;)
  • *****
  • Posts: 15963
  • Karma: 470
    • CiviCRM site
  • CiviCRM version: 4.2+
  • CMS version: Drupal 7, Joomla 2.5+
  • MySQL version: 5.5.x
  • PHP version: 5.4.x
Re: Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members
October 15, 2011, 08:30:55 am

lindsey has mentioned the issue and files to check in her post above:

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,21612.msg91158.html#msg91158

lobo
A new CiviCRM Q&A resource needs YOUR help to get started. Visit our StackExchange proposed site, sign up and vote on 5 questions
Pages: [1]
  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Using CiviMail (Moderator: Piotr Szotkowski) »
  • Sending Postal Mail/ Email to Households excluding their household members

This forum was archived on 2017-11-26.