Talk:New Member Kit
The following is the content of an email sent by Rob Brooks (who has been sending out New Member Kits for over a year) to Chris Swift, Jim McIntosh and Scott Marshall on January 18, 2018.
Well, there is more than one way to do this.
What I did was access the CRM, usually monthly, when I got around to it, and check the donations, and the ones that were new members, I made a card and sent it in an addressed envelope along with the most recent newsletter from the supply I had. Essentially for me, it was a tedious cut and paste job. I get the name and paste it onto the card template and print it. I get the full address and paste it onto a label template.
I have 2 printers. A colour laser I used for the cards (HP 2025), and a specialty label printer Brother GL-700 (pick one up at Staples for $100 ish). I don't know how well an inkjet would work for the card stock. I have not used an inkjet since before Y2K. I never had much success feeding envelopes into my laser printer and I just prefer making labels instead. Even the cardstock can jam, so I always use the manual feed. Everybody has their own preferences and tools and capabilities.
I was doing it once a month. Takes about 5 minutes per card the way I was doing it. Probably not the most efficient way. Usually about 12-24, so an hour or two. Saturday morning with coffee.
But I was also doing many other things with the CRM and knew my way around pretty well. I always had it open 100% of the time. I guess another approach would be to make a small mailing list from the CRM once a month and dump it into Excel. Then the Excel file can be forwarded to whoever is doing the job. You could even then do it with mail merge and that might be quite a lot faster. That is probably how Jim does the Newsletters. For now, I won't do anything about permissions in the CRM. Jim has full access and if he needs something done and asks me to do it I will. I think Scott and Allen also both have full access as well. I think we should not assign administrator access to more than a very limited number of people unless it is the only way to get things done. Scott is probably the most techy of the three (Jim, Allen, Scott) and Jim is also very experienced with the CRM. Unless Chris is doing something else in the CRM, I would actually recommend doing this a different way like the second way I outlined. Jim is actually pretty good on all this mailing stuff, and maybe even better and more resourceful than me. Or Scott could do the mailing list thing and forward it to Chris.
If my help is needed, let me know.
Rob
I have found my Inkjet printers (an HP and now an Epson) will print on Avery 5160/8160 labels (30 per sheet). If I don't have to print 30 or more, I print from the bottom of the page. For example, if I only need to print 6 addresses, I put them in the bottom 6 labels (rows 9 and 10 on the sheet). Next time I print in rows 7 and 8, and so on.
It probably isn't practical to print directly on bubble envelopes. However I suspect regular manila envelopes would be satisfactory, and it is possible (and practical) to print on them.
I would definitely use Mail Marge for this job, especially since we are currently (early 2018) getting several new members each week. The membership card should have the Member's name and expiry date printed on it.
--Jim McIntosh 15:08, 13 February 2018 (EST)