Letter and Form Mail Merge
 

Direct and personal Communication with members is a vital tool in membership retention. Often these communications take the form of simple acknowledgements or personalized reminders. A simple letter editor is often your best tool. Now, we have three solutions to consider. One is our MA Association letter writer, you can set up templates of standard letters that might be required to mail out to members.

On the member screen is a letter writer button, which you can press and have the above dialog appear. Select the message you want to use here, or modify the existing one using the clone button, and then print. Within seconds you can have the letter you wanted ready to put in the post. Mail merge using fields within the system allows the letters to be personalized (such as with a certification date or ID number as in the example above). Note that these letters are intended to be single page items.

For forms such as renewals, certificates, receipts or invoices, we generally build into the system custom reports which are designed to print from either a master report screen in a batch mode, or individually from specific screens within the system at the press of a button or menu selection. The printing of these types of letters and forms can automated as well, based on triggers such as membership renewal or specific events such as payment of invoices. They can be sent to a printer, or a PDF file can be generated then attached to an e-mail automatically.

For more complicated form letters, the MA Association Manager can be programmed by our staff to interface with Microsoft Word to drop complicated templates into a new document which can then be edited by the operator. Using the automation features built into Word, applications can be written for you which open a document, write a predefined set of text into it, then allow the operator to store it. This is the way that some agenda are created.

Call us to see what might help speed you your clerical functions.