3 Reasons to use Mailing Preferences

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Have you ever had a member ask you to mail their member renewal to their business address? Or a patron asked to only receive email communication? Did you know there was a handy place in Altru to track this information?

If you go to the Communications tab on a constituent record, you will see a sub-tab for mailing preferences. Here is where you can set individually what mailing pieces go to which address.

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Mail preferences work in conjunction with Address Processing Options used in each mailing process in Altru. These options will check the mailing preferences on the constituent record first and then if no preferences are present, you can choose to send your mailing to another address.

Here are three great reasons to start using mailing preferences in Altru:

  1. Go Green

We have the option on almost everything to receive paperless communications—not to mention, sending emails instead of physical letters can save your organization some green!

Most organizations have groups of people that love email communications and other groups that may not even have a computer! Depending on your constituent base, you can start by adding mailing preferences to the smaller group.

For example, if most of your constituents use their email, you can add a mail preference to those constituents that you know prefer mail. Because you can configure most mailings in Altru to send both an email and a mail piece, you can tell Altru to send email to everyone without a preference, and send mail to who prefer mail.

  1. Take Special Requests

Mailing preferences allow us to quickly and easily take many types of special requests from our patrons, donors, and members.

We can use the Mail Type to specify donor preferences for each type of mailing in Altru.

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For Appeals, we can drill down even farther with Appeal Category:

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For example, a donor asks to receive annual fund appeals via email, but capital campaign appeals via mail to her home address, we can add two mailing preferences to add to her record: one for any appeals with the Capital category and another for any appeals with the Annual category.

Using mail preferences, you can track your donor’s special requests. This pleases the donor—they see you are honoring their requests and are receiving the right communications at the right place—and you’re not even breaking a sweat.

  1. Globally Add Mail Preferences

Mailing preferences are now easier than ever to use because you don’t have to add them one-by-one. With the release of Global Change this summer, you can quickly and easily add (and delete) mailing preferences to groups of records.

Be sure to check out our video on Understanding Global Changes here.

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