CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,
CiviCRM Newbie here, so please excuse any ignorance. Running CiviCRM 2.1 under Joomal 1.5

In our organisation we have about 1000 members of which about 300 either don't have an email address or we don't have access to it. Does anybody have any good ideas on how to send reminders, receipts etc by creating letters and then printing for sending by snail mail without going through hoops exporting data, inserting into mail merge etc.

In the member options you can set communication preference as post, but I can see how to send by post.
Am I being thick or completely missing something?

Any help would be most grateful

David

Yep - agree with Lobo. Here are my hints for making the process as painless as possible for getting the data back in if you are doing bulk mail jobs.

Ensure you include the Internal ID on the letters/invoices and if legal, on the envelope label so that this can be entered in to spreadsheets for importing posted Contributions or updating address details

For any 'returned mail (Gone No Address) we do as follows:
- enter the ID in to a spreadsheet
- import the this file using Import and add those people to a new Group (GNA from xx mailout)
- export that Group with their old address details
- concatenate their address details in to a single cell in a new columns called Notes
- import again, using Internal ID, with empty Address fields, and import the old address details in to Notes (so you have it on record)

For any posted contributions
- enter ID and payment /membership details to a spreadsheet
- import via civiContribute and civiMember

We find the above far quicker and smoother than dealing with individual contacts.

And, it has just been suggested to us that if we invested in a barcode reader we would be able to sidestep the issue of manual data entry (with associated risks of incorrect data) for the Internal ID.

HTH

- import again, using Internal ID, with empty Address fields, and import the old address details in to Notes (so you have it on record)
HTH

Just wondering if empty address field really works?
I had a client try this and I tried it on the sandbox (see attached).

That should not be too hard. You can copy most of the "Send email" code and create a new taks called "Print message" and the last step would be creating a PDF page or something instead of sending an email

lobo

A contributed patch along with an issue would be great and enable it to be part of 2.3

lobo

I was offered a small amount of funds to do this.
If someone does it before me (likely) I could just give them the money?
I quoted it at 10 hours.

Here's a patch adding the feature to 'Print PDF Letter for Contacts' to the Find Contacts > Advanced Search area. It's based off of the Send email code as Lobo suggested.

Testing help, and any suggestions to improve the code would be very much appreciated.

If this is a feature that could be added to core, please let me know what would need to be done to get it up to par and what the procedure of submitting it is.

Two issues that might need to be addressed:
iso-8859-2 letters don't display correctly, and this seems to be an ongoing issue with dompdf. Has anybody gotten these characters to work with dompdf?
We might need an option to ignore users who are set to not want mail sent to them but it looks like you can also get the same functionality from the search before using this function.

Kia ora slip - good work - not in a position to test now so thought I would just enquire - does it enable 'page size' to be set, or it it predetermined?