Postal Mail Communications

It's often thought that in the 21st century there is no longer a need for old-fashioned snail mail.  But you can't send everything over the internet, and if your constituents aren't online - or don't want to be - then postal mail is still an effective and crucial communication tool.

This chapter discusses the different ways that CiviCRM helps with postal mail and post mail campaigns. You should have a strong understanding of CiviCRM's search features as well as custom fields, activities, profiles, and how to perform mail merges using word processing software.

Planning Your Mailing

Before beginning any communication program, take the time to identify goals and plan the process steps. For our purposes, there are a few key questions to ask before you sending out postal mailings.

• What types of mailing do you send out to your constituents? Are mailings always sent to everyone in the database or are they frequently targeted to a select list of records?
• Are you interested in tracking who receives your mailings?
• How do you want to greet or salute recipients (e.g. Dear Jane)?
  

Tracking

For many organizations, its important to track the recipients of a mailing. Knowing who has been appealed to is a key part of your interaction with contacts.  It is also useful for reporting success and return rates of a mailing used as part of a fundraising, membership development, or event promotion campaign.

There are a couple of ways to track recipients of a mailing:

• put all recipients of a mailing into a group and call it Spring Mailing 2009, for example.  Then to track recipients all you need to do is run a search of who you want to receive the mailing and then add those recipients to a new or existing group. The downside to this approach is that in a very short time you will likely have group overload. Another reason you may not need to do this is that many times the recipients of the mailing include everyone in your database. If you add them to a group, it serves no real purpose as far as segmenting your data.
  
• Use activities. Since a mailing is a type of interaction with your contacts, CiviCRM activity types are a great way to track recipients. If you have first created an activity type called "Mailing," you can run a search and add an activity record to everyone in the results list. That option is under the "More Actions" menu and is called Record activity for contacts.

Tools for mailings

CiviCRM provides two tools that are useful for creating mailings: export contacts and mailing labels. The Mailing labels tool is useful to quickly print out standard address labels when you don't need to personalize their content.  Export contacts is useful for creating mail merges and when the standard mailing labels don't provide the information you need.

Greetings and Salutations

An important part of a postal mailing is including a salutation that is personable and friendly. Many people also prefer to be greeted in a special way if they are a doctor or esteemed person like a politician. Every individual record can have a prefix (Ms., Mrs., Mr., Dr., etc.), suffix, and a Greeting Type. 

There are other options for handling greetings that you should be aware of:

• Nickname. To be consistent across contact types, it may be easier to always use the core nickname field as the greeting value since every contact type has that field. This eliminates the need to process multiple merge workflows based on the Greeting Type field.
  
• Custom field(s). Some organizations may find it easier to create custom fields labeled Salutation (or Greeting) and Addressee. Salutation would serve as the universal field to greet all contacts and addressee will determine what appears on the actual envelope. This approach can be helpful for handling contacts who have special preferences with how you greet them in the letter (Dear Jack) and how they are addressed on the envelope itself (Dr. John Smith).

Mailing Tactics

Once you have identified who your mailing recipients are, how you will track them, and how you are going to handle greetings and salutations, it is time to begin your mailing!

Creating Your Mailing

1. The first step is to run a search of who you intend to send the mailing to. Sometimes this may be your entire database.
2. From the search results screen you will see a More Actions dropdown menu that allows you to, among other things, export the list as a CSV file. As you export to a spreadsheet, you can determine which fields you want to export to your spreadsheet and optionally save the list of exported fields as an export mapping template. Export templates are very useful if you run similar mailings very frequently and you have a defined set of fields you use every time. By default, CiviCRM will export a contact's name, contact information, email and phone, list of their groups and tags, current employer, and much more.
3. Once your spreadsheet is created, you can do a mail merge using popular word processing software that will insert fields you want into the letter. For mailing labels, perform the same search as in step 1 above but under the More Actions menu, choose Mailing Labels (see the screenshot below). Then select the mailing label number, determine if you want to exclude people with "do not mail" checked in their privacy options (checked by default and recommended), and whether you want to merge two records in your search result with the same mailing address into one label. This last option is very useful when sending a mailing to a household or organization where you don't want them to receive duplicate mailings. When the records are merged, each name at that address is one line on the label.

Fundraising Mailings

The steps above are useful for generalized mailings but many nonprofits have specific types of mailings such as thank you letters, renewal letters, and general fundraising appeals. The following tips and notes provide suggestions for how to handle those types of mailings.

• Thank-You Letters. Many organizations like to send personalized thank you letters to donors thanking them for their support. When doing so, it is often convenient to include a specific acknowledgement of the donor's contribution amount. For example, a letter would say, "Thank you Judy for your recent contribution of $35." In order to accomplish this you will need to create your list using CiviContribute because the results of a search using Find Contributions include amounts details. The results also include contact information so it can be easily used for mail merge purposes.
  
• Similar to thank you letters, renewal letters ask members and/or donors to renew their membership or previous donation level. In this case, it may be more useful to use CiviContribute to retrieve their last gift amount.