I will be relieved to see this feature available. Thanks for any update.

Would love to have the ability to personalize our email templates just a bit more through merge fields. My previous grants management system had this and I'm missing it big time. We pride ourselves on our relationships with our grantees and would love to improve those "touches." Even internally it would help our Program Officers know what is in their queue -- i.e. when something is assigned for eval. Ideally, we'd like to craft an email that starts like this:

"Dear <<Applicant First Name>>,

Thank you for submitting <<Organization Name>>'s grant proposal for <<Project Name>>."

Any update on this?

We would love this as well, would definitely take the communications through Foundant to the next step in my opinion.

Our foundation is interested in this, in case you need more folks to chime in on its importance for future planning. We are looking forward to the UI updates too.
Thanks Chris!

Hi Barb,

Thanks for you thoughtful and complete questions. One thing we've done that is a prerequisite to addressing the 2 points you raise is to update our email provider. Given that well over 150,000 emails a month are coming out of GLM, we felt that we had to have a better provider to help maintain our reputation and keep us off of any email blacklists.

Both of your questions really go to the point of handing HTML functionality in emails. There are pros and cons to this. The pros obviously have to do with the presentation and functionality that can be included in emails. The cons mainly involve increased risks of emails being flagged as spam (since so many emails that include links, etc. are generated by spammers, it elevates the risk that emails from GLM will get flagged as spam).

As we continue to grow accustomed to the functionality our new provider has, we will be looking at allowing for more HTML email functionality. We just want to make sure that we do so in a way that doesn't compromise the delivery of emails from GLM.

I hope this makes sense. It's a really frustrating thing for me - but the fact that over 40% of all emails sent are spam really makes it important that we implement these changes correctly.

Thanks for you comments and questions!
-chris

Hi Deirdre,

Thanks for taking time to post this suggestion. It's one that has already generated a lot of discussion in this thread "Mail Merge for Email Correspondence."

Please take a look at that thread for more feedback! Thanks again,
-chris

Hi Carly,

Thanks for taking time to submit this suggestion. HTML-enabled emails are something we do want to address. However, we need to tackle a couple things first. One is to update our email provider (something I hope to have done in the next few months). The second is to update our user interface to make it easy to configure both an HTML and a plain-text version of an email. This is important as HTML-only emails can engender a higher spam score than emails that provide a plain-text version as well.

I hope that makes sense, and thanks again for your suggestion,
-chris

It would be much more beneficial for us to send out reference/acceptance/rejection emails to our applicants with hyperlinks to our website and other pages. The email looks very cluttered when we have to type out the websites that we wish to bring to our applicants' attention. Please make this a feature on a future update!

Chris,

I'm following this dialogue string with interest, since I was just about to post this idea to the Idea Lab! The ability for a merge function on email templates would be fabulous!

While I'm sending this, I might as well cover two other questions that I have regarding email templates, as follows:

1) Has there been any thought about providing some very basic formatting functionality within the templates? An itty bitty WYSIWYG editor such as is provided for this reply? it would be nice for emphasis or to allow italics to identify titles. And including hyperlinks would be out of this world!

2) Is there any possibility of including a signature block on emails we send? I'm not expecting Outlook; however, a little more email functionality would be a plus. I've spent a lot of time trying to convince my co-workers to send emails from within GLM, so there is a communication trail (can't say paper any more!). However, the Program Manager has just about had it with her inability to attach her signature block. We prefer our emails to look professional and until GLM, always used a more formal approach by including a salutation, closing and a signature block. She is very frustrated in having to type in the entire signature block information every time she sends an email from GLM.

I guess that's it for now! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,
Barb

thanks, Chris. Knowing it's in the works is much appreciated, even if it has to wait for the UI updates. All good things in their time! :-)

Hi all,

Barb - to your point, I think most users would benefit from this feature.

The changes we made to the report field type functionality (now shared questions) with 5.0 was one precursor to simplifying the work needed to implement an email merge solution. At this point, we still have some user interface (UI) updates to make to GLM that will in turn simplify the effort needed to implement an email merge solution, and really make it a better experience for users. There are other things we need to do in the short term (as you all might easily imagine by just looking at the Idea Lab), so this isn't going to happen in the next 3-6 months, but it is slated to happen soon after the UI updates are made.

Thanks all for you feedback as well as your patience.
-chris

This is a duplicate item. See this thread for my comments: https://community.foundant.com/foundant/topics/e-mail-templates-with-logos-signatures-ip1f8e62h9vry

Thanks,
-chris

It would be helpful to be able to include a Foundation logo and signature in Foundant e-mail templates. Sending e-mails to grantees through Foundant is certainly easier than having to individually contact each grantee, but Foundant e-mail templates allow no formatting/images which makes our e-mails feel unprofessional and unofficial.

Like others, we use email extensively--especially since we chose Foundant GLM because of its electronic capabilities, allowing us to reduce our paper output! Having the ability to use merge functions in email templates would be a definite time-saver and plus for us. I completely understand the need to balance the needs of some with the needs of many; however, I'm counting on the fact that more organizations are going paperless and someday those of us with this request will be "the many!"

Hi Karen,

Email merge functionality has been on our list for some time. We are currently in the middle of updating report field functionality. When that's complete, we will be looking at some user interface changes. These 2 improvements will make it more realistic to add email merge functionality. At this point, it's hard to provide a tentative date, but report field changes and user interface improvements will be happening over the next 6-9 months.

Thanks for taking time to post this suggestion,
-chris

We also use email extensively, both in the grant review process and when forwarding grant recommendations to our grantee partners. We also create the merge documents in Word and then copy/paste them into emails. It would be more efficient for us to merge directly into an Outlook generated email message.
Thank you,
Kathryn

Thank you for recently including an email notification when a form is submitted! This has been a wonderful and helpful addition.

Our idea is that in the future we will be able to personalize email templates. For example, I would like to schedule an email template to send to an applicant, confirming receipt of a submitted form IF there was a way that the email could be written to pull items from the form. For example, it should pull the contact name, organization name, project name, submission date, etc. to say " Dear Karen, Foundation is in receipt of ORG's DATE LOI for PROJECT" etc, etc.

I currently have templates written like this that I personally send (for a variety of things) but it would be great if some were automatically sent.

Hopefully there are others that might be interested in this feature and we appreciate your consideration for this.

Thank you!
Karen

I have a colleague looking to do this now for client, so we would also like to see this capability.

Thanks,

Mary

I support this idea - and understand it might take a while to develop... currently I mail merge (or export data then mail merge) and copy/paste into emails.

posted September 13, 2013 by Mary Giraulo, United Arts of Central Florida