We cover the full process of sending out printed summary letters in this article.
Sending the letter out as an email only requires a few additional steps:
- Ensuring your email configuration is set up to send out emails from the CRM
- Having a .txt document set up to send out as your email content
- Setting it up as an email form letter
- Creating a group of constituents that can receive your emailed summary letter
- Processing the letter
Email Configuration
Please see this article to ensure that your email configuration is set up within the CRM. This must be done first before any other steps are followed.
Creating a .txt document for your email content
When sending out an email form letter, your .doc or .docx document will be used as an attachment. You will want to create a simple .txt document on your computer to send out as the email content. We have an examples here that you can use here.
Once it is saved to your computer, you can upload it to the CRM to be used. This is covered in our main Summary Letter article here.
Setting up an email form letter
Once you have both your .txt email content and your main document saved to the CRM, you will want to set up your email form letter. To do this go to Manage>Configuration>Form Letters & Receipts. Then click Add new form letter to screen.
The process is the same as a printed letter except for the need to set the Delivery Method to Email. When you do this, it will prompt you with new fields:
You will want to insert your desired email address from the organization, subject line and attachment name to make sure this is easily identifiable.
The Email Content option will need to be your .txt document. The Select Attachment option will be your main document created using the process outlined here. Once you have set everything up, click Save.
Creating a group of constituents that can receive your email
The process to identify your records will be the same using the built-in query called Summary letter query. The only adjustment to this will be adding a filter to the Email Address field to be is not blank. Use the variable that is under the main Constituent heading in the Available Fields section. This is what your filter fields section should look like if you make no other adjustments:
Once this is done, run your query and then save it as a smart group. The reason for this is that if you save this as a smart group, you can use this every time you run the summary letters for each year and will not need to do this again.
Processing the email summary letter
Once you have saved the letter and your group, you can now run your summary letter.
Per the last step on this article, you will choose the option Donors in a specific group and choose the group you saved based on donation history and who have an email address:
After that is done, click Search and this will bring back the respective donors who have an email address and are eligible to receive an email.
Select your email summary letter and then choose to process the letter:
With any form letter that processes, you can edit the email content and attachment before choosing to send.