Most organizations will be familiar with the idea of a merge letter. Rather than creating a generic letter addressed to "Dear Supporter," you want a personalized greeting that includes the individual's first name, such as "Dear Sofia".
Sending a letter with a personalized greeting and other personalized content inside an envelope with the correct address on it is no small challenge when hundreds or thousands are being produced. Large direct mail houses will often have special machines that print a personalized letter and its personalized envelope at the same time, and then insert the included content and seal the envelope, all within a strictly defined workflow that eliminates the possibility of mismatched elements. Small organizations may have envelope stuffing "parties" where letters are folded, address labels are applied, the folded letters are stuffed in the envelopes, perhaps a reply envelope or postcard, and the package is sealed and mailed. With all of that activity going on, it's all too easy for a single envelope or letter to get missed or mismatched unless there's lots of checking going on.
An easier way to handle things that are less prone to mix-ups is to use window envelopes. The letter is laid out and folded in such a way that the mailing address is displayed through the window.
The letter itself will have merge fields in place to fill in the field values for the contact. For example, the address block will use the appropriate merge fields, and you may address the recipient as "Dear Firstname" using another field.
There are two ways you will construct your merge letter: outside of the system using MS Word, Open Office Writer, or a similar word processor; or inside the system using CiviCRM's Print PDF Letter function. There are pros and cons to both solutions:
- Using a word processor will provide tools you may be more familiar with and more control over the layout. However, you will have the added steps of exporting your CiviCRM contact data to a
.csvfile, and then linking it as a mail merge data source. - CiviCRM's Print PDF Letter tool benefits from direct integration with your data. However, the interface for laying out your letter uses the WYSIWYG editor toolbar which is not well-suited for print-based layouts. You are likely to find it to be a bit cumbersome and awkward to use, requiring quite a bit of trial and error before you have the document laid out correctly.
If your letter will be used repeatedly, such as a welcome letter to new members that you generate monthly, it will be worth the time and effort to create it in the system. However, if this is a single-use letter, it may be easier to process it outside the system using tools you are familiar with.
Printing a PDF letter starts with the same steps as many other actions you may take on groups of records:
- Use any of the search procedures outlined in Chapter 3, Installation, Configuration, and Maintenance to find the contacts that are to receive the letter.
- Select the contacts that are to receive the letter.
- Select Print PDF Letter for Contacts on the -actions- button.
- Click on the Go button.
- If you have an existing template, you may use the Select Template field to pre-populate the content region. Otherwise, begin creating your letter content from scratch.
Mail merge fields in CiviCRM are called Tokens. We've mentioned them earlier when talking about e-mails. The interface and tools for creating a PDF letter are almost identical to the e-mail creation process, except that the final product will be a PDF file for printing rather than an e-mail sent directly to constituents.
To the right and above the content region of this page, you will see a link to Insert Tokens. Clicking on it opens a popup window where you can select and insert tokens into your document. Use the search box at the top of the window to quickly locate your desired token.
When tokens are inserted in your document, they will appear in brackets and include the actual data type and field name. You can move tokens around your document, but be sure not to alter the text inside the brackets as it will break the field reference.
Once inserted, your page with tokens may look like this:
Dear {contact.first_name}, I want to invite you to our …
After processing by CiviCRM, the token will be replaced in each copy of the letter by the first name of each contact who is to receive the letter. For example:
Dear Josephine, I want to invite you to our…
Here are a few tokens that will have particular use and significance as you assemble your letter:
- Display Name: Generated for every contact record, specific to the type of record. For Organization and Household records, the organization/household name serves as the display name. For individuals, the display name is calculated as "first_name last_name" by default. If your mailing includes contacts across multiple contact types, this field can be used to refer to the contact regardless of its type.
- Postal Greeting: This is also a constructed field, intended to be the greeting line in a letter. A default formula exists for every contact type and will be automatically created and saved for each record. You may alter this value on a case-by-case basis for each record through the communication preferences panel. The most common value is "Dear name".
- Addressee: This is also found in the contact's communication preferences panel and represents a calculated value for how the contact will be listed in the address block.
- The following tokens allow you to customize your letter's address blocks to fit your needs:
{contact.addressee} {contact.street_address} {contact.supplemental_address_1} {contact.supplemental_address_2} {contact.city}{, }{contact.state_province}{ }{contact.postal_code} {contact.country}
Whether you are creating a standard letter that will be used multiple times or want a layout framework with standard fields, it's likely that at some point, you will want to save your content as a reusable template.
You will need to create your template by going to Mailings | Message Templates or Administer | Configure | Message Templates. Use the User-Driven Messages tab to create new templates. Once created here, they will be available to the PDF Letter tool.
Once you have finished authoring the letter's content click on the Make PDF Letters button to generate the PDF file. Be sure to review it thoroughly and make sure your tokens have rendered field values as expected. If they did not appear correctly, visit one of the records in your search results and make sure the fields actually have data in them. Then, try reinserting the tokens using the popup tool.