Mail Merge function for Carry Over/Deferred Proposals
I find the mail merge function so easy and convenient to use for grants that have been approved or declined. However, in our organization it is very common for grants to be carried over or deferred to the next cycle. Just like we send our grantees notification of approved/declination letters we should have the ability to do so with grantees whose proposal is still pending.
My idea is simple: introduce/add the mail merge function for applications that are in the evaluation open stage.
Jacqueline Lara
William G. McGowan Charitable Fund
Idea posted November 18, 2011 by Jacqui Lara, The William G. McGowan Charitable Foundation
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Chris Dahl commented
Hi all,
We've added mail merge functionality so that it's available from any status. Adding another status is a different issue, and one that is represented in a number of other threads in the Idea Lab.
Given that we've addressed the mail merge functional request, I'm going to close this thread, but we'll be looking at the status threads going forward.
Thanks again for the suggestion and feedback,
-chris -
Ideas commented
Hi Grant,
Thank you for your response. Just to give a little more information on how this would benefit our process and perhaps others, i'll provide an example. After our board meeting, any grants that we will carried over to the next meeting are currently in limbo in our system. We need to send out a drafted letter to grantees notifying of this change and request additional information should anything change before the next meeting. That is where we need the mail merge function for carry overs.
(Letter would require: Org Name,Org Address Block, Project Name, & Amount requested)
In addition, after every meeting we will create a report (Decisions) in reports beta for reporting and accounting purposes. In this report we need to note everything that has been approved, declined, and carried over. Because 'Carry Over' is not a function when deciding upon a grant, it will not end up on our report and has to be added manually as well as our field of 'Board Determination'. Which requires going back and performing a data export on all of our processes to grab this field.
Not sure how difficult it would be to add 'Carry Over' as a function when deciding on a grant, but seems like a good recommendation for us. It would seperate these requests in the dashboard from all other incoming requests queued up for the next meeting.
Please let me know if I can provide more information that would be helpful.
Thanks!
Jacqueline.
posted April 13, 2012 by Jacqui Lara, The William G. McGowan Charitable Foundation
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Grant Elliott commented
Hi Jacqueline and Melissa,
I completely agree with your suggestion! Information should be mergeable from all areas of the software and this is something we often hear during training. I'm not sure when this could make it on the development list but we have been talking about it and it's benefits for everyone. Let me ask you this, what type of information would you both be looking to merge? If it's just contact information, you can currently do that even when something is Not approved or denied. If you want report fields and information other than contact information, then we're stuck with the Export Data to Microsoft Word merge. Let me know what you'd be looking for here so I can start taking some notes.
Thanks to you both for posting this!
Grant
posted April 3, 2012 by Grant Elliott, Foundant Technologies
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Ideas commented
I too would find this very useful.
posted November 22, 2011 by Melissa Wheaton, Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities