Mail Merge

Doris Acheampong

Hi,


I'm new at Raiser's Edge. Can anyone tell me how to reverse gifts marked as acknowledged so that you can run the merge again? I didn't save the letters I was running before closing the word wizard to make changes to the fields I choose. I came back to run the merge again and now it says there is data matching the parameters because I had already selected "marked as acknowledged". So now the gifts are marked as acknowledged but I don't have any letters.


Thanks.

Karen Miller

Unfortunately, the only way I have found to correct this, is to manually uncheck that box and take out the date.   If there is a better way, I would love to hear about it.   I think we have all done that at one point or another.

Doris Acheampong

Thanks, Karen!

I started doing that but was not taking out the date. Would it
save that way?

Doris

Doris
Acheampong

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Karen Miller

From what I find, yes the date must come out.   If there is a better way, I hope someone else can respond.   On another note, did your screen change to blinding white?  Mine did today. I was on with  BB for 1/2 hr. and no help.  they said, it was a new update.

Dariel Dixon

You either have to change them manually, or via a query and global change...


If you created them all via batch, and you saved a gift query, that would be able to work.  Otherwise, you would have to group them together somehow (ie., gift date, gift type, etc.) and do a global change on acknowledged, as well as deleting the acknowledge date.


EDIT:  Interestingly enough, right after I posted this, my mail merge had a hiccup and didn't finish the merge, but marked all the gifts acknowledged.  I manually changed the information and ran the merge again.

Chrissy Haskell

A best practice when running acknowledgements with the Mail tool is to print off the letters prior to clicking "yes" to the button that prompts you to mark them as acknowledged. After you have printed them, then go back to start the merge, click "yes" to the prompt, and then you're all set! 

Here is a resource to walk you through that:
https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/40819?_ga=2.64262703.1872445821.1585574096-519948673.1574871289&_gac=1.50086674.1583865179.EAIaIQobChMI682FycWQ6AIVxMDACh1CJQxpEAAYASAAEgK2EfD_BwE


Like Dariel said the best way to quickly mark those gifts as "not acknowledged" again is to have a query and do a global change. A best practice to automatically create a query for all of your gifts in the Mail process is checking the box on the General tab to "create output query". 

How to globally change records: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/37890?_ga=2.230594972.1872445821.1585574096-519948673.1574871289&_gac=1.250808754.1583865179.EAIaIQobChMI682FycWQ6AIVxMDACh1CJQxpEAAYASAAEgK2EfD_BwE

Kristine Marvin

I have made this mistake a few times. What I do to fix it is build a gift query to find the gifts you want to change. Then do a global change, in Admin- Gifts, including the query you created to replace Acknowledged with Not Acknowledged. Now you can use the records to print your thank you letters.