Quickly create letters from constituent

Genevieve Zevort · May 20

Good day, years ago we could create letters directly from the Constituent record. Is there still a way to do this?

We have a staff member dedicated to quickly replying by mail to Major Gift donor communications, and the current process is extremely manual:

Find the correct letter template
Copy/paste the address line by line, plus other details from the constituent record into Word

Using a full Word merge feels like overkill for only a handful of letters per week. The AI acknowledgement feature also doesn’t work for this use case since it pulls from gifts (?) and generates emails, not printable letters.

Any suggestions or best practices would be greatly appreciated.

Tatyana Leifman · May 20

I think this is currently only available using 3rd party tools like Red Arc.

Joe Moretti · May 20

That went away a few years ago when there was an issue with Blackbaud and Microsoft, so it no longer exists.

Candy Reichert · May 21

RedArc has a free level that would probably work for your purpose. Check out their Free option for Letter Box. There are limited letter templates you can only print letters, no emails, and they can be added to the record.

Madeleine Holdsworth · May 21

Yes, the RedArc free version of LetterBox works very well. It's user friendly and I've recommended it to several clients.

Alex Wong · May 21

if there is interest, you can also do a much more customized org-specific version of this via Power Automate+SKY API+SKY Add-in

However, there is learning curve (how steep the curve depends on your experience and "work personality"), you do not need to be a developer/programmer, but it helps

Karen Stuhlfeier · May 22

Those were the good old days. We shouldn't have to use a third party vendor to do something like this.

Sarai Hoffman · May 22

I have a couple of clients using Red Arc. Even if the free version doesn't meet your needs, they find the paid version to be well worth the time/effort it saves their staff.

Joe Moretti · May 25

I agree 100% with Karen, for what we for Blackbaud we should not have to use any third party vendor. The whole third party vendor thing is completely out of control. This is the thing I don't get with putting all the time and effort into RE NXT, but still having to rely on a third party. Such a scam.

Suzie MacMillan · May 25

Since we cannot do the "quick letter" from a constituent anymore, I have "quick letter" exports set up for different word letter merges and I just pop in single constituent IDs or a query if it is more then one letter and hit export. All of my word merge letter templates are saved in one folder on my local drive and I have my RE database set up to export the CSV to the same folder, I almost like it better this way because its much easier to update the word merge templates then how we used to have to do it in the database

Quickly create letters from constituent

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