In this session we walked through the latest updates to our Marketing Templates. We followed that up with how to send one-off letters through individual records and the action board, then showed how to generate bulk letters and merging mailing labels.
Updates to Direct Mail Support and Marketing
Centered around email enhancements and letter activity.
Everything begins in the template manager which is still accessed through the settings menu grid in the top right of your navigation.
- Changes you will notice:
- Prompt that requires action when accessing the template manager asking you to Create a New Template or Load an Existing Template
- Templates have been renamed
- Marketing - This template has replaced what was called Email Templates and can be used for your marketing communications needs whether it is digital or print. Simply put, marketing templates are related to a contact and won’t have the transactional merge tags.
- Transactional - This type of template is for receipts or transactions that would be applied to gifts. Anything transactional will have additional gift merge tags, which is a differentiator between this template and the marketing template.
- Completely new functionality includes the Output Type:
- Print - This template has text and picture optimization for printing purposes
- Note: Print will lack content menu options like the Button, Menu and video as it is meant to be downloaded and printed.
- Digital - This email template will work the same way as it has in the past
- Note: All digital templates used up to the time of this latest release will remain as digital. There isn’t a way for the DonorDock team to decipher how each customer intends to use their past templates in the system to filter them by digital and print. However, you can go back into a saved template and Save it As a print template if need be
Step by step self-help can be found in this Managing Templates Article.
In the future, very soon, you can expect updated system generated templates that you will be able to use for both Marketing and transactional templates.
Complete Letter Activities in a New Way
Individual Contact Records
- Enable Use a Template
- Choose your template
- Download and Print your mailing right from the activity, and
- Close it out
Action Board Suggestions or To-Do’s
- Choose a Letter Activity for your suggestion or To-Do
- Complete the same steps as above, and
- You will receive a prompt to download and print your template
- When you complete this task, it will updated in the contact record’s activity timeline
Bulk Mailings through Reports
- Choose a Contact Report that you want to send a letter to
- Note: You can only generate 200 letters at a time. If you have a recipient list larger than 200, you will need to do the bulk letter sending in batches
- Once you’ve pulled back the report you want be sure to update the Address line to Filter on Not Empty.
- Pro-tip/Suggestion: On the flipside, use a temporary badge to identify contacts you don’t have an address for as this is a good opportunity to reach out to them and get that information.
- After Step 2, you can Choose letters in the top right corner and click on print
- This will generate a pdf of each letter that you can review and will further close a letter activity on each of those contact’s activity timelines.
- To take this a step further, you can now do all your letter mailing in one place by taking that same report and doing a mail merge for your address labels.
- Check out the Doing a Mail Merge Microsoft Office from DonorDock article to help walk you through a mail merge step by step
What’s Coming Up Next
- You can expect updated system templates that we’ve created and plan to publish shortly after this release. We are also welcoming feedback if you have other system designs you would like to see. Submit a suggestion on Feature UpVote through the Settings Menu in the system or at ideas.donordock.com
- There are some backend things we will be working on in the near future, particularly around reporting performance and scalability. While you may not see noticeable, visual change, it is something that is very important to us as we grow so we have a model that grows with us but also for you from a user experience perspective.
- Lastly, our roadmap still contains plans for marketing segmentation and the ability to create contact lists from badges. More to come on that!
