Red Arc's Letterbox v. Smart Things' Smart Letters - which to use?

Amanda Tindale

Hi, we're weighing up our options since the February letters changes. Currently considering the free version of Red Arc's Letterbox, and also looking at Smart Letters from Smart Thing. Would anyone like to comment about their experience of using either of these? Before the change in Feb, we were still creating letters individually on each record, rather than using Mail or anything like that, due to the range of templates we used and the amount of funds we have. But we're reviewing our approach to this too. Any thoughts would be most welcome, thanks.

Katherine Mannion

I've been using LetterBox with a few of my clients who have simple letters. There are some limitations, though, that might give you pause. For instance, some fields are not available for merge. (I suspect these fields may not be available for any of the 3rd party letter merge tools due to web view field availability.) Also, since I am working remotely for my clients I am sending them the pdfs that are generated by LetterBox, and they sometimes find that frustrating because they might need to make edits at the time they print (ie. fix margins). In this case, I had to re-run the letters after adjusting the margins in my template.

But all-in-all, I like LetterBox and their support has been great when I've had any questions. Since it's free, you could just try it out on a batch of gifts and see how you like it. The setup was really easy!

Good luck. Keep us posted on what you choose and how it works out.

-Katherine

Nicholas Mascari

“But we're reviewing our approach to this too.”

Are you having trouble implementing the new mail process after the update?

I had used the automatic “merge..” button through Mail before the update, but now that I've been forced to switch, I actually find the manual way of doing it to be much faster.

If you describe your situation a little more I may be able to help.

-Nick

Henrietta Hawkins

Thank you so much for your kind words Katherine, it's very much appreciated!
@Amanda Tindale feel free to get in touch with me at henri@redarc.systems with any questions. Same for anyone else - we always love to hear how people are looking to create personalized letters and answer any questions you have

Amanda Tindale

Thanks for the review Katherine - useful to know the benefits and limitations you've experienced.

Apologies for the slow reply by the way - for some reason I never get notified when someone replies to my topics. I haven't worked out how to make this happen!

Amanda Tindale

Hi Nicholas - I've read that it's much more efficient to do letters in bulk, rather than manually on one record at a time. But when I looked into using Mail, it didn't seem suitable for us. We batch add gifts each day, but we use a variety of different letter templates, so Mail looked too complicated/time consuming to set up. I could only see it working if we added a batch that needed the same template for each letter. So given that we are looking at the possibilities of Smart Letters or Letterbox, it seemed like a good time to revisit the idea of thanking en masse rather than one at a time.

Nicholas Mascari

Amanda,

I may have mistyped what I had intended. With the recent update in February, you have to manually compile the letters outside of RE. This does not mean you have to do them one at a time. It's simply manually moving the automatic process from RE to your personal desktop.

The tricky part is getting it setup, but once it is set up. It takes about 2 minutes to export the data from a gift batch (regardless of how many gifts/letters) and turn them into letters.

I guess the question to ask would be, do you have some IT person that is helping you consistently in the database (a database administrator, database coordinator, etc.)?

If not, you may want to look at other software/services like you and other people have mentioned, since I would guess they are much more user-friendly.

If you do have an IT person, they should be able to set this up and show you how to use it.

If you'd (or anyone reading this) like me to go into details on how to set it up, I can do that. Just let me know.

Amanda Tindale

Thanks Nicholas. I am the database administrator (amongst other things) but I'm self-taught. So I'm still learning about the best ways to do things, and most efficiently. We don't have our own IT people unfortunately, as we're connected to a large hospital trust, so we use theirs. I'm going to review Letterbox and SmartLetters with our Fundraising team, but I'll also bear your offer in mind, thank you!

Henrietta Hawkins

Hey all - just wanted to let you know we've released a couple of new features that might help with your questions if you still needed input:

Conditional Templates, which allows you to use information such as Letter Code, Fund or Gift Amount to automatically segment your data into different letter templates, all in a single Bulk Letters Run. No need to use separate lists for different letter types – Conditional Templates allow you to easily create a single run that contains multiple templates. More info here

Editing individual Letters in a Bulk Letters run or Constituent/Gift Tile. More info here

Let us know if anything else would be helpful - your input/feedback is so helpful on what people need and we can create more info/videos etc.

Hope that helps

Warren Sherliker

Hi all

Just to confirm SmartLETTERS is now live in the Blackbaud Marketplace. You can try SmartLETTERS free for 30-days.

If you would like to speak to us about SmartLETTERS you can do so by booking a call.

thanks

The SmartTHING Team.

Whitney Shelton

When will you all be adding the “tribute” information to the field options??

Jana Fross

@Henrietta Hawkins Is it possible – or will it soon be possible – to add in Tribute fields as an option?

Warren Sherliker

@Jana Fross Hi, We are adding Tributes shortly, the endpoints are now available to pull this information so we can include as an option in the settings of SmartLETTERS. The feature will just appear but you can also be notified via our website newsletters.