MIP eMagazine: Best Software

Fundraising: Paradigm

Creating professional correspondence using mail merge

Personalizing correspondence with your donor base is a great way to show them you care – and help drive future fundraising efforts. MIP Paradigm allows you to create letters with information specific to the donor using the mail merge feature. But how do you change the format of the Gift Date and Gift Amount merge fields in Microsoft Word after merging so they are more appropriate for a letter?

For example, the default display setting for Gift Date is 2/26/02, but you would like it to read February 26, 2002. The default display setting for Gift Amount is 1000, but you would like it to read $1,000.00.

Once you have created your Word merge document but before you do the actual merge, change the merge field formats in Word for the Gift Date and Gift Amount fields by using Toggle Field Codes.

Place the cursor on the <> and/or the <> merge field and right-click your mouse.
A box of options appears; choose “Toggle Field Codes”
The merge field(s) will now display a slightly different verbiage.
To change the format of the Gift Amount, place your cursor directly after the name of the merge field (after the letter ‘t’ in the word amount and before the closing brace). Hit the Spacebar and insert the following: \# $0,000.00
To change the format of the Gift Date, place the cursor directly after the name of the merge field (after the letter ‘e’ in the word date and before the closing brace). Hit the Spacebar and insert the following: \@ “MMMM d, yyyy”
Once again, the merge field(s) verbiage will chance:
Continue with the Merge process. The final draft will have the Gift Date and Gift Amount merge fields displayed in the following formats based on the merge field parameters inserted:

Gift Date will be printed as: February 26, 2002
Gift Amount will be printed as: $1,000.00

For additional information, including screen shots, please see Article 112027 in the MIP Knowledgebase at www.mip.com/boss/.