Confidential Mailing

Adam Zarybnicky

We have a constituent organization that provided specific mailing instructions regarding a recent pledge. The business's owner stated that all mail regarding the pledge should be addressed to him at the business and marked “Confidential." These mailings will include pledge reminders, thank-you letters, and year-end tax receipts.

What is a good practice to ensure all these mailings are marked as confidential? If the constituent was an individual, I would probably customize the primary addressee format, but I don't think that's possible for an organization. The owner also donates personally, so we can't change his addressee format without affecting personal mailings as well.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Marguerite Gravois

@Adam Zarybnicky
Assuming he is soft-credited from the Org or is a contact, you could try creating a specific letter type for that pledge along with its own mail merge which pulls in a custom addressee from his record that includes the word “Confidential”.

Faith Murray

@Adam Zarybnicky, another option is to create a second Contact relationship, with his name but not linked to his individual record, and then go ahead and include "Confidential" in the addressee line. I have to do that for businesses sometimes when we don't want the owner's spouse showing up in the addressee line.

Karen Diener

@Adam Zarybnicky
I'm not sure how you generate your pledge reminders, but when I had this kind of situation, I used a couple of methods to make sure I didn't miss these specific requests.

One was a Constituent notepad type of “Pledge Reminder” that contained anything anyone needed to know about the pledge from the constituent level. It often contained information like “always send duplicate mailing to his assistant” or “always send to business address”.

The second was a notation on the pledge itself. It often referenced the aforementioned Constituent notepad, which was helpful if someone was looking at the Pledge (or payment) records on their own.

The Pledge Reminder process in Mail didn't suit our needs, so I always had to do an Export but that made it easy to include those necessary fields. I found it pretty easy to manage, and because it was a notepad I had plenty of room to explain the situation if needed.

Karen

Faith Murray

@Karen Diener and @Adam Zarybnicky, that's another good idea, if you're going to use Export instead of Mail. We actually have a process for our annuity letters which runs through Export: the constituent has a special attribute (custom field) that merges as bright red, bolded text into the letter when there's a special note. It allows us to easily scan for edits and tweak letters before mailing. I do prefer Mail for pledges, but Export is always an option.