Stuff You Need to Know About Mail

The Mail module in Raiser's Edge is a great tool for end-of-year mailings to your constituents. You can print thank you letters, prepare appeals, and send receipts to your constituents, all using information directly from their records. 

Stuff You Need to Know this month is focused on the Mail module. We've picked some of our favorite Mail resources that can help with your mailings, and we'll be hosting a Live Chat on the 14th with live demonstrations and a Q&A with me and a special guest! Do you have your own tips and tricks? Share your wisdom over at our Forum Contest! 

But first, to give you a taste of some of the great resources we've got highlighted, let's talk about that most dreaded of Mail messages...



As with elsewhere in the program, this means that no records meet the filters or options you've chosen for this mailing parameter. While there can be many reasons a record is left out, the most common when running Receipts or Donor Acknowledgement Letters is that the gift is already marked Acknowledged or Receipted. 



It's easy enough to change these fields back for a single gift or a handful of gifts, but sometimes you may need to change a group of gifts at once.

Let's say I've got a batch of gifts that I need to acknowledge, but I find that the whole batch has mistakenly been marked acknowledged. In this video demonstration, I check the contents of the query and confirm the problem, then perform a global change to mark those gifts Not Acknowledged. More information on this process is in this article for Acknowledge status, and this one for Receipt status. 

*Please keep in mind, not every user of RE should necessarily have access to Global Changes, since they can impact all records in the database. If you don't see the Admin or Global Change options, processes like this may need to be performed by an Admin user of Raiser's Edge. 
For more handy tips on Mail, check out Stuff You Need to Know, and join us for our Live Chat on the 14th. I hope to see you there!