Introduction Mail Merge You may want to send a letter to 1000 contacts. The letter may be any type of communication: an invitation, a receipt, a thank-you letter. One choice is to make the letter identical for everyone: just photo-copy the letter 1000 times, and send them off. However, recipients prefer personalized communication. Instead of sending the exact same letter to every contact, you can create a template for the letter. The template specifies blank spaces to hold information like names and address. When you perform a mail merge, either for paper mail or email, Sumac automatically fills in the spaces to create personalized communications. This Lesson covers these topics: Sumac Administrator settings related to Mail Merge How to prepare a template How to use Mail Merge to create many personalized documents Before viewing this video, you should be familiar with the content of these training videos: Lesson 1: Basics for All Users Lesson 2: Communications Lesson 3: Single Contact Record Lesson 4: Contacts List Lesson 5: Finding Contacts Administrator Preferences for Mail Merge If you log on as a Sumac administrative user, you can specify settings [Select Preferences from the Administrator drop-down] that affect how Sumac does Mail Merge [Click Mail Merge Tab]. This check box [point to Track Template Usage Information checkbox] causes Sumac to automatically track which templates have been used. This drop-down menu [show choices in Format of Dates drop-down menu] lets you tell Sumac how to format dates that it inserts into document templates when it performs Mail Merge operations. The exact date formats are localized. The way they will appear in your documents depends on date format settings on your computer. Page 1
The Omit Country checkbox [point to Omit Country checkbox] allows you to leave out the Country when printing addresses for local and national mailings. So if your office is in Canada, then Canada will not be put in addresses. If your office is in the United States, then U.S. will not be put in addresses. This checkbox [point to Ask user to choose checkbox] tells Sumac that when someone is generating tax receipts for donations, it should prompt the user to choose from pre-built sets of templates. Prepare a Template Mail Merge operations require a template document. Here are the steps you should follow to create a template: Draft the text Use Sumac to turn it into a template Test the template Format the text and create a template of the desired type Let s assume that we have drafted a letter already[open text file that is on desktop]. It is just a text file, so it has no special formatting: no letterhead or special fonts or colours. Once we have the template working correctly, we will deal with appearance. For now, just select the whole document then copy it to the clipboard. June 28, 2011 Mrs. Jane Doe 123 Main Street Anytown, MI 12345 U.S. Dear Jane, Thank you for your donation of $100.00 on June 25, 2011. We will use it to support our school breakfast program. Yours truly, Anne Smiley, Executive Director Children s Charity Sumac has a special Make Template window that helps you build templates[choose Make Template command]. Page 2
The way this window works is that the top half [point] holds the template we are writing. When you click the Test button [point], Sumac performs a Mail Merge operation on the template, and shows the results in the bottom part of the window [point]. If you paste the draft letter into the top part of the window, you have the beginnings of a template. Then choose a contact for testing. You need to do this so that when Sumac needs information from the database, it knows which contact s information to use. Click the Test button. Sumac does a Mail Merge. Here [point with mouse] is the result in the bottom window. You will note that it is exactly the same as the template. This is because the template consisted of just static text. There were no variable parts, so Sumac just copied everything from the template to the resulting output document without making any changes. You need to tell Sumac where to insert text that is from the database or is calculated. You do this by inserting formulas. Formulas must be enclosed with double angle brackets. Formulas can do calculations. For example, if you insert the formula <<7 * 8>>, then click Test, you will see that Sumac replaces the formula with 56. Most of the time, you want your formula to hold a field or piece of data taken from a record in the database. Perhaps the date of a donation, or the name of a contact. There are hundreds of these fields, so it s hard to remember their names. But Sumac helps by providing menus that list all the fields you can use. [do this while speaking] So, if you want to change the static date at the top of the letter, so that it will show the current date, select the date, then choose Current Date from the Miscellaneous menu. Sumac inserts the formula [insert <<g_date>>] that will generate the current date in a merged document. Now if you click Test, Sumac shows the current date, instead of just a static date. Now replace the other pieces of the letter that should be retrieved from the Sumac database. Do this with the: mailing address [insert <<c_mail_address>>] salutation: [insert <<c_virtual_letter_salutation>>] note that you need to use the virtual salutation. The word virtual means that even if there is no salutation in the contact s record, Sumac will create an appropriate salutation for the contact Page 3
donation amt [insert <<d_total_amount>>] donation date [insert <<d_when_received>>] Click Test to try it out. Note that the mailing address and salutation, which come from the contact record, are produced correctly. But the donation amount and date, which come from a donation record, are not. They have just been replaced by asterisks. This is because of the testing context [point at testing context]. Let me explain what happened. When you ultimately use a template, you will be clicking a Mail Merge button in one of the Sumac list windows. The Testing Context drop-down menu tells Sumac which list window you will be in when you do the mail merge; this enables the Test button to behave more realistically. Clicking Test when in the Contacts context means only contact information is available, so formulas that need donation information won t work. So, change the context to Donations. In the Donations context, Sumac knows about contact information, but it also knows about donation information. Now click Test again. This time everything worked. The date, contact, and donation information were all filled in correctly. By the way, the Test button uses real contact information. But for the other types of records, like donations, it creates test data. So the contact we chose may not have actually made a donation of $100, or indeed any donations at all. But the Test button creates one to be used for testing purposes. Now you have a working template. It consists of static text [drag select], and formulas [drag select] that insert information into the right place to make a personalized letter. Four Types of Files Supported Sumac can do Mail Merge with four different types of Templates: Plain Text, which is what the Make Template window produces. It consists of text with no formatting. It is useful for checking out and creating templates. It can also be used for a quick note to close contacts, but since it is unformatted, plain text is not appropriate for bulk paper or electronic mailings. Rich Text Format (RTF), which is a format supported by word processors. This is mostly used for documents that are going to be printed. You create the document, and open the resulting rtf documents with your word processor. Portable Document Format (PDF), which is particularly helpful for generating tax receipts, since this format cannot be edited, and can be emailed to your donors. Page 4
and Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), which is the format usually used for sending bulk email. When you close the Make Template window, it puts the whole template on the clipboard. Format Template Using Word The template you created in the preceding steps is going to be printed, so let s use a word processor, Microsoft Word, to create an RTF template. The details of these operations may vary with different word processors, but the basics are the same for all. Open Word, and paste the template into a new document.[set spacing to 0 after paragraph] Add a document header with your organization s logo. Do not just put header information in front of the text. This is important. Information in the header of a document is only in the document once regardless of how many recipients will be getting the letter. But if you put header information in with the body of the letter, then it is repeated over and over again, once for each recipient, which may make the resulting merged document unmanageably long. Add a blank paragraph at the start of the document. Give it a format that causes it to start a new page. [Format Paragraph icon Line and Page Breaks Insert, Page Break Before] This causes each letter to start on a new page. Save the template as an RTF document [put on desktop, name Donor Thank-you Letter Template]. Use Template Now you can try the template in Sumac. The template was designed to work with donations, so open the list of Donations. Search to find some recent donations. Sort them by donor name, so that it will be easy to find each one in the merged document. Then click Mail Merge. Choose the template. Sumac asks if you want to save the Donor Thank-you Letters in a single file or multiple files (one for each merged document). If you are printing the letters, then having them in one file is most convenient. Specify the output file s name and location, then click OK. Sumac then performs the Mail Merge. Page 5
When the Mail Merge is complete, Sumac asks if you want to save a Communication Record for each contact. If you are testing, you could click No. But normally you click Yes, enter the details of a communication, then click OK. Sumac creates a Communication record for each contact the letter is being sent to. Open the output file. Look it over. Then print it. In real life, the next step would probably be tell Sumac to print labels for the recipients of the letters. Lesson 4 explains how to do that. Summary In this lesson you learned Sumac Administrator settings related to Mail Merge How to prepare a template How to use Mail Merge to create many personalized documents To learn about some of the more advanced features of Sumac templates, download the Sumac Users Guide from sumac.com, and read the chapter named Create Document Templates. You should now proceed to other Sumac lessons to learn more about how Sumac can help you every day. Page 6