Maintaining communications

Communications can be used in situations where a group of people either belong to a constituency or a group of tagged IDs. However, they do not necessarily have to belong to a Synergetic constituency. The group can be built up over time, such as for your magazine or the annual giving appeal.
Communications can be sent by mail or electronically via email.
Use the Communications Maintenance function to maintain:

• details of a communication with a group of people
• the community members who are to receive the communications
• community members who received past communications.

How to:

• Search for a communication on the system. See Searching for communications.
• Create a new communication. See Creating new communications.
• Add recipients in bulk. Adding or deleting community members to communications in bulk.
• Maintain notification layouts. See Maintaining email and SMS notification layouts.
• Send email or SMS notifications to recipients. See Sending email notifications.
• Maintain communication types. See Maintaining communication types.

What you can do:

Examples
Magazine example
This example outlines a method for sending out magazines:

1. Create a new communication. See Creating new communications.
2. Determine the constituencies you want to mail the magazine to.
3. Add each constituency. See Adding or deleting community members to communications in bulk.
4. Mail merge with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Query using the Communication Code as follows:

• Run Microsoft Query on the vCommunicationsCurrent database view.
• Use selection criteria to pick out the relevant communication code.
• Transfer the results of the query to Microsoft Excel.
• Use this to create a mail merge in Microsoft Word.

Annual giving example
This example outlines a method for sending out letters for a single event:

1. Create a new communication. See Creating new communications.
2. Determine the constituencies you want to target and the letters to be sent to each group, based on their constituency and priority.
3. Add each constituency. See Adding or deleting community members to communications in bulk.
4. Mail merge with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Query using the Communication Code and the Comment fields.

Tip: When using Microsoft Query, you can either use the procedure crspCommunityCommsCurrent, or type crspCommunityCommsCurrent followed by a space and your communication code into the SQL window.
Note: The Comment field contains the priority and constituency. Priority is determined by the numerical order that constituencies are added to communications. For example, 02 - @STF means that the staff constituency has second priority because it was the second constituency bulk added to the communication.