Sending pledge reminders

In this article:

• Step 1: Create and upload your pledge reminder template
• Step 2: Build the mailing
• Step 3: Download and print the mail merge files
• Step 4: Repeat next month

If you track pledges and installments in LGL, you can use the built-in mail merge features to send reminder letters to donors who have made a pledge. A common scenario might look like this:

• You have donors that have made pledges with various schedules (monthly, quarterly, etc.)
• You want to send donors a reminder about their pledge and their next payment before it comes due

NOTE: You can also send reminder emails instead of letters if you prefer. To send reminder emails, apply the steps in this article to creating your email.

Step 1: Create and upload your pledge reminder template

First, create a mailing letter template that will be used to send these mailings. Here's a very basic example:

Then navigate to the Mailings > Templates > Letter Templates page:

To create the template, click the Add MS Word letter template or the Add LGL template button, depending on which kind of template you want to use.

If you're creating an MS Word letter template...

Click the Add MS Word template button:

Choose either the basic_word_template.docx file (which gives you the option to create a letter template on the fly that you can customize to your preferences) or click the Upload a new file button to upload a Word document that you have created for this purpose from your computer (read more about how to use Microsoft Word with letters here):

Click the Choose file or Browse button (the name of the button can vary based on the browser you are using), and then navigate to and select the Word document you want to use as your letter template from your computer:

Instead of using a letter template saved on your computer, you also have the option to create your letter content using the Letter Content and P.S. Content fields in the mailing builder. Using this method, your Word template would contain the [[letter_content]] and [[ps_content]] merge fields, which would pull the content from those panes in the mailing builder, accordingly:

Envelope and label selections can be made in the Additional options part of the page, as shown below. Please see articles on how to create envelope or label templates for more information.

Lastly, click the Save button.

Step 2: Build the mailing

Now that the template is in place, you can start building the mailing itself. Navigate to the Constituents > All Constituents page to start the process.

Search for donors with installments due next month

The first thing to do is find the donors that have an open installment due next month (or in whatever time period you are looking at). To do this, you can create a search like the following one:

Or, if you have not created pledge installments, you can still search for constituents with open pledges and send them reminders. To find constituents with open pledges, you can run a search from the Constituents tab as shown here: 

Find out more about advanced search in LGL.

Create a mailing by clicking the Send mail button

Your search and the results (constituents) it produced are brought into the first step of the mailing builder:

Click the Next button, or click the 2: Letter, labels & envelopes button, and select the template you created in Step 1:

Select your envelope or label preferences, and then click the Next button. Here you can name your mailing, review the available selections, and make any needed updates:

The next step lets you review the mailings themselves. From here, you can download a sample letter or the entire mailing and print your letters:

Step 3: Download and print the mail merge files

Once you've created the mailing, it will be accessible on your Mailings > Mailings > Draft Mailings page:

From here you can download a sample set of letters/labels/envelopes, and the full set of letters/labels/envelopes, and print them out.

NOTE: Once you have downloaded and printed the files, it's a good idea to mark the mailing "Sent" because this is now the status of the mailing (as long as you have sent the letter).

Step 4: Repeat next month

When it comes to repeating this process next month, you can speed things up by going to this month's reminder mailing, and clicking the Clone button:

This will create a new copy of the mailing. If you have used relative dates in your query ("Next month rel.", for example), you shouldn't need to change anything. You can jump over to the 4: Review, download & print step and save the new mailing.