Letters Overview 💜

DonorDock helps you create, print, and track personalized letters sent to your contacts. Letters are recorded as activities, giving your team a history of mailed communications alongside other contact engagement.

You can use DonorDock to:

• Create and record a letter for an individual contact

• Generate personalized letters from a template

• Print letters in bulk from a Contact Report

• Record letters, postcards, thank you notes, or other mail that was created outside of DonorDock

• Generate printed receipts and other transactional documents

• Prepare contact data for mailing labels

Creating an Individual Letter

When creating a Letter activity, you can configure the following information:

Using Templates for Letters

You can use DonorDock templates to generate personalized letters using information stored in your contact records. When the "Use Template" toggle is enabled on a Letter activity, you can select the Marketing template that should be used instead of manually entering Letter Content.

Printing Letters in Bulk

For direct mail campaigns, fundraising appeals, or other large mailings, you can generate letters for multiple contacts from a Contact Report.

Start by running a report containing the contacts who should receive the mailing. Use report filters to define your audience before generating the letters.

From the report:

1. Select Letters

2. Select Print

3. Choose the Marketing Template you want to use

4. Select Print Letters

DonorDock generates personalized letters for the contacts included in the report and records the appropriate Letter activities.

Reports let you build specific mailing audiences based on information stored in DonorDock, such as giving history, contact information, Campaigns, Appeals, Badges, or other available report criteria.

Recording Letters Sent Outside of DonorDock

Not every piece of direct mail needs to be created in DonorDock.

For example, your organization may send:

• Handwritten thank you cards

• Postcards

• Invitations

• Printed newsletters

• Letters produced by an outside mailing service

You can still record these communications in DonorDock by adding Letter activities to the appropriate contacts.

For larger mailings, you can also log Letter activities in bulk from a Contact Report. This allows your organization to maintain a record of the communication without generating the actual document through DonorDock.

Printed Receipts and Transactional Documents

Printed gift receipts are similar to letters, but they use Transactional Templates rather than Marketing Templates.

Individual receipts can be generated from several locations where gift information is displayed, including:

• The Gift record

• The Gifts section of a Contact record

• Campaign Gifts

• Appeal Gifts

• Fund Gifts

• The main Gifts page

You can also generate receipts in bulk from Gift Reports. When a receipt is generated through DonorDock, the associated gift can be updated to indicate that a receipt has been sent.

Mailing Labels

If you are preparing a physical mailing, you can use a DonorDock Contact Report as the source for mailing labels.

Your report can include fields such as:

• Addressee

• First Name

• Last Name

• Address Line 1

• City

• State

• ZIP Code

Export the report and use the resulting contact data with a mail merge tool such as Microsoft Word to format and print your mailing labels.

Choosing the Right Workflow