Appeal Mailing Workflow

The solicitation of your constituents to donate to your organization’s mission plays an essential role in your fundraising efforts. To use appeal mailings effectively, you must perform several steps to create the communications used to support these efforts.

 •  Create the appeals, or planned efforts, to contact constituents to generate donations and revenue. When you add an appeal, you specify its start and end dates and the goal amount. For information about how to add an appeal, see Add Appeals.

 •  From the organization calendar, plan your organization’s communication effort. For example, at the end of the year, plan your appeal mailings for the upcoming year. From the calendar, you can quickly add appeal mailings and check dates to help avoid conflicts with other activities at your organization. For information about the Plan appeal mailings page, see Planning Calendar.

 •  To determine ask amounts for the mailings, create an ask ladder as necessary. An ask ladder is a set of fixed or calculated ask amounts based on a constituent’s giving history and included on a response device. For information about ask ladders, see Ask Ladders.

 •  On the Appeal Mailings page, add appeal mailings as necessary. When you add an appeal mailing, you select the appeal it supports, its mail date, and its processing options. You can also create the letters to include with the mailing. For information about how to add or edit appeal mailings, see Manage Appeal Mailings. For information about the HTML editor used to create content for letters, see Communication Letters.

 •  A mailing task is a job required in preparation for an appeal mailing, such as to prepare the mailing for production. From the record of an appeal mailing, add or manage the tasks associated with the mailing as necessary. When you add a task, you can assign it to staff members involved with the mailing. You can also set up email alerts to remind the owner to complete the task. For information about how to manage tasks, see Appeal Mailing Tasks.

 •  On the mail date for the mailing, run the mailing to send it to the recipients. When you run the mailing, the program uses recipient information based on the letters’ merge fields to create personalized output for the mailing. You can also schedule when to send the mailing’s email content to its recipients. For information about how to run or activate an appeal mailing, see Start an Appeal Mailing.

 •  After you run the mailing, download its mail output for delivery to its recipients. You can also manually send its email content to recipients. For information about how to manage the output of a mailing, see Letter Output and History.

 •  To view the effectiveness of the activated appeal mailing, create and manage key performance indicators (KPIs) for the mailing. For information about appeal mailing KPIs, see Appeal Mailing Key Performance Indicators.