Postal Mail Communications

This chapter discusses the different ways that CiviCRM helps with postal mail and post mail campaigns. It will help if you already 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 activity, take the time to identify your goals and plan the steps. For our purposes, there are a few key questions to ask before 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 group of contacts?
• How do you want to greet recipients (e.g. "Dear Jane" or "Dear Jane Doe")?
  

There are three ways that you can use CiviCRM in postal mailings:

1. Generate labels: print out standard address labels when you don't need to personalise the content, for instance to send a printed brochure.
   
2. Export contacts and do a mail merge to an external tool (such as OpenOffice or Microsoft Word). Refer to the chapter on Exporting in the Getting Around section.
   
3. Generate PDF letters and do the merge directly in CiviCRM.
   

TIP: Many nonprofit organisations in the USA need to sort recipients of a mailing based on zip code for bulk mailing purposes. If this is true for your organisation, it is recommended that you create your mailing labels using a word processor where you can control the sort order, rather than in CiviCRM. You can reuse the same spreadsheet for your mail merge.

Fundraising Mailings

Many non-profits have specific types of mailings such as thank you letters, renewal letters, and general fundraising appeals which need to be personalised. Here are some suggestions for how to handle those types of mailings.

• Thank-you letters: when sending personalised letters to donors thanking them for their support, it is often convenient to include specific acknowledgement of the donor's contribution amount. For example, a letter could say, "Thank you Judy for your recent contribution of ." To accomplish this, create your list of recipients using CiviContribute because the results of a search using Find Contributions will include contribution amounts. These results also include contact information so can be easily used for mail merge purposes. You can also create a custom token to get the latest contribution then use the PDF letter action. For detailed information on custom tokens, see the Hooks chapter of the section Extending CiviCRM, and also the Mail Merge Tokens for Contact Data section in the CiviCRM wiki: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Mail-merge+Tokens+for+Contact+Data).
  
• Similar to thank-you letters, renewal letters ask members and/or donors to renew their membership or previous donation level. In the case of renewals, it may be more useful to use Memberships > Find Members to retrieve their membership type and expiration date. 
  

Greetings and salutations

An important part of a postal mailing is including a salutation that is personable and friendly. Some people prefer to be greeted in a special way if they are a doctor or esteemed person such as a politician.

You can set a specific postal greeting format for each contact. There are several options from the friendly "Dear John", to more formal "Dear Mr. John Doe". You can also enter a customized greeting ("Your royal highness"). Postal greetings can be edited in the Communications Preferences section of the contact edit form. If you need to set or reset postal greetings en mass, refer to the Command Line Script Configuration documentation:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/x/LIK9AQ

Print PDF letter

The workflow is to first select the group you want to target, then choose the action "Print PDF letter" from the dropdown menu. The letters will then be outputted as a PDF, allowing you to easily print them.

To create the letter:

1. Go to Search > Find Contacts or Find Contacts > Advanced Search.
2. Enter your search criteria and click Search.
3. Select the contacts who will receive the letter.
4. From the Actions dropdown menu, choose "Print PDF Letter for Contacts" and click Go.
5. Create your letter, using the formatting options provided. You can personalise the letter by using tokens, for example Postal Greeting is a commonly used token in this situation. Click in the body of the letter where you want to enter the token. Then click on "Insert Tokens" located above the letter at the top right and select the desired token.
6. Before you move to the next screen, decide whether the format of this letter could be used again. If so, check the Save New Template box and enter the Template Title.
   
7. When your letter is finished scroll to the bottom and click Make PDF Letters.
8. A pop-up window will offer the option of opening or saving the PDF. Open and review your letter and then print it, or save the PDF and review at your leisure.
   

 

TIP: You can use this feature for any kind of document, not only letters. For example, you could use it to print attendance certificates for a workshop.

Generate mailing labels

Generating mailing labels is a very easy and useful function.

1. Perform the search to select the contacts you want to target.
2. Choose Mailing Labels from the Actions dropdown menu and click Go.
   
3. Select the mailing label style
4. 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 any records with the same mailing address into one label.

This last option is very useful when sending a mailing to a households or organisations where you don't want them to receive duplicate mailings. When the records are merged, each name at that address is listed on a separate line on the label.

Your system administrator can configure the fields included in mailing labels. Read the information on configuring address settings in the Contacts chapter to learn more about the options.