Snailmail Letters (Thank You, Welcome, Renewal Reminders)

[jt196]

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 Greenberg]

Hi James - First, welcome :-)

Hopefully others out there with similar workflows will respond with more specifics - but in the meantime some things for you to check out that may facilitate your tasks:

* Online membership signups and renewals create an associated contribution record - and each contribution record has a "Thank-you Sent Date" field - which is blank by default. You can use CiviContribute >> Find Contributions so find contributions with "Thank-you date not set?" Then export these and do your mail merge. Finally, you would create a Profile which includes the Contribution->Thank-you Date field and use that to "Batch Update via Profile" the contributions for which you have sent Thank-you Letters.

* You could create a custom field (yes/no) - "Welcome Package Sent" - "Used for" Contacts - and use a similar approach for tracking the sending of Welcome packages. In this case, you could create a Smart Group for contacts where this value = No - and then add a link to this group as a CMS menu item as a way to give quick access to this task.

[jt196]

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?

[tim g.]

I hope that I'm not committing a forum "faux pas" by resurrecting old posts when I comment on them. In past forums that I've been a part of it's actually a "faux pas" the other way around; to make a new post on something that has already been brought up somewhere else in the forum.

In any case I have been looking for four days to choose the best path for He Cares foundation to go with sending and tracking snail mail that is sent to CiviCRM contacts. This really looks "right on topic" with what you were speaking of except that I'm hoping to NOT use the membership part of CiviCRM; at least not yet (saving it for CoOp membership).

Here is the basic run down
Most of their future mailings will be modeled after this one. They want to:
a) Send out a snail mail letter asking for a donation to build a children's home.
b) Track and lookup how many people responded back to this letter.
c) Send one of three followup letters to this first mailing based on; did the prospective donor:
... respond back with a yes
... respond back with a "not at this time".
... not respond back at all.
d) track (or pull up numbers) regarding the number of people that responded back to those three snail mail mailings.

I've read over options for the last four days that lean mostly toward using "Activities" as a solution here. However I've read some things about CiviCase that make me wonder (until someone comes up with a CiviCampaign addition) if CiviCase wouldn't be able to track several parts of a Campaign to raise funds for a building.

And perhaps the "smart search" option that jt196 brought up might be able to help me as well.

Any advice or direction that you might offer would be appreciated; thanks.

[Donald Lobo]

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

[tim g.]

Thanks again Lobo. ... btw you really get around on this forum, on the blogs, on the IRC Channel, and it seems like everywhere on the net that CiviCRM is mentioned. Do you sleep? :-)

I'll feel more confident about heading down the Activities path now. At least until the CiviCampaign addition comes to fruition one day. I saw a few mentions of that in a development part of this forum. It looks like everything our NPOs and NGOs are looking for.

Now time for me to implement some of those Activities I've already been playing with, brush up on my CiviCRM search saavy, and get into a little hooking.