How to Create a Year End Gift Letter that Shows All Gifts for the Year

Please see the attached document for steps on how to create annual gift letters for donors.


Note that slowness while merging can occur if you have a lot of gift records thus we recommend breaking down the data being exported out of FIMS into groups so that the exported file itself will have less records for example:

Export out donors A-G, do the merge and create letters for that 1st group of donors.

Then export out donors H-N, do the merge and create letters for that 2nd group of donors.

Then export out donors O-Z, do the merge and create letters for that 3rd group of donors.


Slowness when merging this annual letter is caused by Microsoft Word doing a database insert on each letter which in and of itself is not an issue but when there is a lot of data in the exported file what happens is that the database insert has to search the entire file each time for each letter before it does its insert. So, the process has to parse through the entire file each time for each database insert on each individual letter which is why it is recommend to break up the export in smaller parts.