When creating batch correspondence for requests, choose between sending to request and organization affiliations

When I am creating batch email correspondence, all the emails will go to the primary contact and I can specify what roles I would like copied (e.g. development person)  The problem is that the system pulls the contacts associated with the organization - and not the request.  Since we have an active granting program and receive thousands of applications - I may have 20 or 30 contacts in a single role affiliated with a particular organization.  What I need is some way to specify that I just want the person in that role affiliated with the request.   Impact: It limits my ability to batch process emails - which is a huge inconvenience.

  • Guest
  • Aug 11 2015
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  • Aug 22, 2017

    Admin response

    Hello! We've merged a few related Ideas into one, here, because the solutions are all similar. All of the ideas related to the problem that, previously, when generating correspondence for Requests in GIFTS Online, GIFTS Online would often include many contacts affiliated with the request's Organization, instead of only including the contacts directly affiliated with that request. This was resulting in large groups of recipients, some of whom were only related to previous grants.

    We believe we've addressed the majority of cases where customers were faced with this problem today:

    When generating correspondence for a Request: This action now takes into account a back-end preference that Blackbaud staff can enable for your site, “Limit Request letter addressees to Request's Affiliations.” With the preference disabled, correspondence for the request for a selected affiliation type will go to all contacts with that affiliation type on both the request and the organization. With the preference enabled, correspondence will only be generated for contacts affiliated with the request, with the chosen affiliation type. If you would like to change this preference for your site, please contact services@microedge.com and our staff will be happy to help.

    We have a few things that are in our backlog:

    1. Generating correspondence for Payments: In an update in September, we will update this feature, to allow you to choose from a dropdown whether you want to include contacts affiliated with the Request or Organization related to the payment. This solves a similar need, but without the need for a back-end preference.
    2. Generating correspondence for Requests: In the future, we may offer a similar dropdown in the UI for sending emails for Requests. If you would find this more useful than the preference described in this Idea, please Vote for this related idea.
    3. We plan to make this process simpler to manage, across the board, in a future update in the next-gen version of GIFTS Online, built in SKY UX

    We are marking this Idea as completed, however, if you feel like your idea or problem has not been properly addressed, please leave a comment here, Vote for a related idea, or create a new one to address your specific concerns. The more feedback, the better.

    Thank you everyone!

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