Thank-you appreciation letters by snail mail are the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. The donor needs to be convinced that he/she has made a right investment and the donation will be used wisely. Appreciation letters need to be sent not only after every donation, but also once or twice a year. Personalizing the letters is key to a positive experience, but when this has to be repeated to hundreds of users, it is a major challenge to small/medium non profit organizations. The cost and effort of producing such personalized letters several times a year can be rather daunting.
Apsona’s Document Merge add-on for Apsona for Salesforce is exactly what is needed in these cases. Users can build flexible templates that can contain multiple fields drawn from multiple objects – Contact, Donations and so on. Aggregate fields and sub lists can also be included in the template. Fields names in the template and in the tables can be adhoc and need not be exact matches to the field names in Salesforce or in the reports. What Apsona brings is the utter simplicity and flexibility of the entire process for the template builder. Apsona’s DocMerge will produce a single or batch of .docx document files from a .docx template and the results can be downloaded either as a.zip file or as a single .docx file with many pages, one for each record and print them.
Here is the simple step by step process.
- A thank you letter will typically have top level merge fields from the Contacts object like the name and address. When creating this letter template in Microsoft Word, create merge fields with the usual Quick parts – Field – merge field. You can also Apsona’s macro to build quick merge fields, and that is definitely a time saver and less tedious (our humble opinion).
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Next, if you need to include a list of donations to the contact, you build tables. Tables are very easily created. The leftmost cell in the table should include the TableStart field, which specifies a record group name following a colon. For example, for the tag TableStart:Donation, the suffix Donation will be the name of the record group for the table. This name is just a mnemonic indicating the kind of list being produced. You can make up any name you want, as long as it does not conflict with any other merge field name in the document. The rightmost cell in the table should similarly include the TableEnd field. These two markers indicate the region of the document that must be replicated, once for each Donation.
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The data source for a template can be obtained from pre-built Apsona reports, or directly from an object. For example, in a single template data for a list of donations can be obtained from a Donation report and data for a list of in-kind donations can be got directly from the Assets object. Before running a pre-built merge template, you can also apply additional filter terms on the fly if required.
That’s it — system administrators can set up templates and its data sources, and all that the end user has to do is run an existing merge action whenever the need arises.
Apsona’s merge tool also supports Excel merge and email merge. For a more details on these features please visit our product description page.
