CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm running CiviCRM 4.3.3 on Drupal 7.20.

I am using CiviCRM to manage a nonprofit after-school activity for children. I have the children, their parents, their siblings, their emergency contacts, and their schools all set up as individuals connected by relevant relationships (parent/child, attends/school-of, etc).

To send bulk email to everyone in Level XYZ (and also Level ABC, PDQ, etc) as well as everyone who has a Parent-Of relationship to anyone in Level XYZ, I use two groups for each level (Level XYZ and Parent-Of Level XYZ). This works just fine.

However, when new students apply to participate in the activity, I want to send a personalized email that is addressed to the student (Dear Suzie Smith: Congratulations on being accepted into Level XYZ of My After-School Program! etc.). Most students do not provide me with email addresses of their own, but all of them provide me with at least one email address of a parent.

I can also envision scenarios where I do have a valid email address for a participant and I want the content tokens to be replaced with the info of the participant, but I want the email to only go to folks with a given relationship (or relationships). That would let me communicate directly with the parent about sensitive issues related to the participant (such as attendance, behavior, or parent conferences).

Are these possible for me to do within CiviCRM?

As a workaround, I export the list of participants in Level XYZ, then manually overwrite the participant's email address with one of the parent email addresses, then use Word mail merge to send the notifications. (Not ideal, but at least it works.)

If this isn't currently possible in CiviCRM, is there sufficient interest to get started with a Make It Happen initiative for this feature?

Thanks for any guidance you can provide.