This time of year, charities receive a greater influx of donations than they normally do at other times of the year. Donors are buying gifts for friends and family, and continue the giving spirit with their favorite charities. Financial advisers review clients' accounts to see what tax benefits their clients can receive with an offset of donations to 501(c)(3) charities.

Good manners demand that charities send thank you letters to the donors recognizing their donations. This administrative requirement can take a lot of time to generate. How does a charity efficiently organize their thank you letters and send them out?

Mail Merge

If your charity uses the open source suite, OpenOffice, you can create a spreadsheet of donor information, and feed it into the word processing application. You can download OpenOffice for free.  When you install it, ensure you choose the Writer, Spreadsheet, and Database options at the very least. If you already have OpenOffice in your environment, but do not have one of these components, rerun the installation to choose them. Here is how you can accomplish a mail merge with OpenOffice:

1. Open OpenOffice, and click on the Spreadsheet option.
2. In the first row, create some field headings, like FirstName, LastName, Address, City, State, ZIP, Donation, DonationDate, and Purpose. The more fields you add, the more customized your form letter can be. *When dealing with ZIP codes, enter a single quote before entering the ZIP code numbers, so it doesn't drop any zeroes from the beginning of the code.
3. Fill in the information for each donor in the subsequent rows. Save often!
4. From the File menu, choose New > Text Document.
5. Create your form letter. (Save often!) You can go to the Tools menu, and choose the Mail Merge Wizard, or use the following steps:
   1. When you want to add a field from the spreadsheet, from the Insert menu, choose Fields > Other.
   2. In the Database tab, click on the Mail Merge Fields option, then click on the Browse button. Choose the source spreadsheet file.
   3. Expand the Source tree until you can see the fields created in the first row of the spreadsheet. Choose a field (or multiple fields) you want to insert. When done, click Close.
6. The Mail Merge Wizard will take your form letter and duplicate it for each person in your spreadsheet. This process allows you to customize each letter further, so it doesn't look like a form letter.
7. You can print this document and address labels, or email it to your donors.

A mail merge should make it easier for you to generate mass mailings to your donor base. It lets you adjust each letter for that personal touch before printing or emailing. If you have another suite of applications for generating letters and spreadsheets, it is likely that they have a mail merge feature as well. Check your documentation or search the web for instructions on how to perform this time-saving task with your suite.