We send our members a letter (serves as acknowledgement) and set of membership cards (1 card per adult in household). Households receive a range from 1 to 6 membership cards.We print membership cards 3 per page on a template that we created in Word. The letter that we send with the membership cards is housed in the Acknowledgement Letter section.
The issue is that Acknowledgement letters print alphabetically sorted, and membership cards print sorted by process date. Since we are stuffing between 200-1500 membership cards and acknowledgement letters in their respective envelopes at a given time, it is important that the membership cards are in the same order as the acknowledgement letters (and envelopes, since we merge envelopes from the acknowledgement letter csv file).
A work-around that I found is to export the acknowledgement letters and the membership cards to excel and sort them both by address. This is the only common field that they have. This is time consuming, however, and it would be helpful if I did not have to export them at all.
My preference would be to print membership cards directly from Altru and to have the acknowledgement letter docx file already in the same order as the membership cards.
On a related note, it would be helpful to have the envelopes also automatically merge as part of the process. In effect, the membership process would create envelopes, membership cards, and acknowledgement letters that are arranged in the same order and ready to stuff.
Thank you!
Guest
This is not planned for 2016; however, we'll investigate this for the future or as the team has capacity. We understand the request is to have control over the order in which the Membership and Acknowledgement processes return results.
We are definitely interested in this too. It's incredibly time consuming to have to have to sort through hundreds of Membership cards and Acknowledgement letters every time we process them.
We waste so much time matching cards to letters. Please revisit this request, Blackbaud!
I would LOVE to see the cards printed in the same order as the acknowledgment letters. However, I'd also be happy if they were in alpha order. We have many different letter types and it is time consuming to sort the cards in the order of the letters. I just sorted 150 cards and it took me over an hour to do.
Turns out, according to Altru Support, the order printed is random. So there's no way to set up a query to print the list again in the same order. :-(
Even if there's not a way to specify the order, if they would print in an order that makes sense, that would help. Or at least an order that relates to a field that's available to sort other lists by.
Yes. For the membership cards to print in a random order makes it extremely difficult to find and pull a few of them for extra treatment when you print several. I really don't care if everything prints in alpha, account number or the order they were entered --- they definitely need a defined order that also matches the order of the letters. It would also be great to be able to pick which of those three orders you prefer.
Dan, what has been your workaround?
Yes! This would be so very helpful