CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My organization just moved to Civi in September and we're still working through our learning curve. As the development director and ad-hoc db admin (we're very small), I'm trying to get postal mailing lists together for our end-of-year campaign. I want to love the Postal Mailing custom search, but it doesn't seem possible to export all the necessary information to do a complete mail merge--the resulting csv doesn't have city or postal greeting, for example. (We'll need to format and generate the letters externally for design reasons, so creating PDF letters in Civi isn't an option).

I've tried doing an export from a basic advanced search, too, but in 3.4.6, there's an error that gets thrown up when you try to merge contacts into their households (we're reported it; issue no. CRM-8971 in the Civi bug tracker) and the export process terminates. We've started the 4.7 install on our dev site; perhaps the upgrade will address that issue once we upgrade live?

I've also started work on a custom search based on the Postal Mailing custom search, but I'm hesitant to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already figured out how to easily export postal mailing info from groups. I would need addressee, mailing address, city, state, postal code and postal greeting and would need to be able to merge individuals into households when necessary...pretty typical stuff for a snail mailing. Anyone out there already figured this out?

Yes, they should be exclusive. I'm looking for option 2; I just want to merge contacts that belong to the same household.

When I try selecting just "merge household members into their households" (and not "merge contacts with same address") out of an advanced search, the export executes fine but the data isn't correct. That is, I can still find individuals who haven't been merged into their households--both their individual account and household account show up in the csv.)

rbrinson - we're also using households in Civi but as that's not currently working for mailings, as a work-around we use the 'merge by address' option in mailing labels as, unlike the postal Custom Search, this gives each person's name on the label. This generally works for us as household members tend to live at the same address!  This means we can search for all adult members and then use this option to create labels that name each person in the search at their (shared) address on one label.  Unfortunately we're also stumped when wanting to externally mailmerge as when we search for individuals and export them 'merged by household' the export does not include the all-important names of each individual in the search who happens to have been merged into a household line.  This means we cannot then mailmerge to a couple eg Tim and Helen as both their names don't appear.

lobo - for the 'merge by household' option in export it would be really helpful to have the names of each search individual included in this.  I guess this will be less of an issue if at some point we're able to have a 'merge by household' option for pdf letters (and this may be something we can work on next year) but it doesn't solve the problem of occasions when external mailmerging is necessary.

I guess this is partly linked to an issue I noted in forum thread http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,19436.0.html and subsequently logged as CRM-8338 in the Issue Tracker.  In short, when using Export 'merge by household' works and 'merge by address' doesn't.  And when using Mailing Labels, 'merge by address' works and 'merge by household' doesn't!

lobo - CRM-8338 addresses the issue with the labels but not in export.  Do I need to log a separate issue on that or somehow enlarge the brief of 8338?

Hoping you get the gist of what I'm saying as it's tricky to write down even though the scenarios are very clear in my head 

Hi lobo
I didn't mean merging individual names to form the household name.  Noting down our scenario is probably the best way to explain what I mean:

- We hold households on Civi eg Mum, Dad, Child
- Our membership is linked to individuals not households eg Mum is a member, Dad is a newcomer, child is an attender or perhaps Mum and Dad are both members.
- If we want to write to all members we search on individual membership type
- For a postal letter we only want one to go to each household if both Mum and Dad are members. 
- If we need to generate an external mailmerge for some reason (as rbrinson does) we can use the Household name field for labels but we’d also like the names of individuals from the search to use in the Dear…. Field (more personal than Dear Mansfields).
- A more frequent scenario is exporting individual members to produce an address list.  Merge by household means a family's info is on one line (instead of 2 for a couple or 6 if they have 4 children!) but it only gives the household name.  There are no columns to show the individuals who were generated in the initial search ie Mum, Dad, Child names.

I realize that we may have complex needs which are not be the norm but if I’m missing a trick when it comes to how I hold/deal with household info, please tell me!  Many thanks.

There has been a fair amount of community effort and hours put on civimail and the email aspects of civi (and also continued support and improvements on that). Hence the nimble-ness of civi's email stuff, IMO

The postal addressees / addressee greeting etc have been getting a fair bit of attention the past 12-18 months and things have improved significantly. However as this thread illustrates, we still have a fair bit to go. We should think about it as a 2 step process:

1. Figure out some of the high priority things that could be fixed that would help a few organizations

2. Figure out how to fund making the above improvements (or convincing your developer/integrator to work on it and contribute it back to the core)

lobo