Here I am, as promised, so you can start working on getting Easter cards (or other holiday cards) in the mail to your donors.

If you do not have birthday and/or anniversary information for your donors, co-workers, or friends, you could send Valentines, Easter, Thanksgiving, and/or Christmas cards. The easiest thing to do, is to divide your mailing list into these four groups, then everyone would at least receive one card.

Managing the Groups Using TntMPD

Again, my recommendation for managing names and addresses is to download TntMPD.  (Read more)

You will need to take a little bit of time to set up your groups. Here’s a simple way to get started:

• Find all the people who have donated in the past two years.  (Start at Step 5 in this TntMPD tutorial) Now “Contacts” contains only this subset of names.
• Click on the Groups button just under the Contacts button.
• Follow these directions to make a new group.  Your donors will be in the fourth panel.
• Use “Add All” and make a group category of Greeting Cards and the Name would be “Christmas.”
• Make another new group.  This time, select just half of the names (maybe A – M last names) in the fourth panel.  Use “Add Selected” and name this group “Easter” under “Greeting Cards”
• Make a third group.  Use Add Selected for last names N – Z.  Name this group “Thanksgiving.”

Now, all your donors of the past two years are in a group to receive a Christmas card.  Half will receive an Easter card and half a Thanksgiving card.  If you have too many names, you could just do top donors this year until you have gathered birthday and anniversary dates.  I will be posting an article soon on how to gather this information from your donors.

After you start collecting anniversary and birthday dates, you might want to consider different groupings. To give you an idea of what to do, you could modify my plan:

• Christmas cards to all donors
• either an anniversary card or a birthday card to all donors
• if I don’t have anniversary or birthday information, either a Valentines, Easter, or Thanksgiving card to the remaining donors

This means every donor will get a Christmas card and one other card per year.  My exception is for our top donors.  I determine who those  thirty families are and send them one additional greeting card.  (I also try to make sure every donor receives at least one hand-written thank you note per year.)  If this sounds like a lot, it really isn’t when it is spread out over twelve months.

Managing the Groups Without TntMPD

Replace the first set of bullet points with these:

• Make a group for all your donors and call it “Christmas”
• Make another new group.  This time, select just half of the names (maybe A – M last names) and name this group “Easter”
• Make a third group for last names N – Z.  Name this group “Thanksgiving”

You will also want to read other posts in this series:

eCards and Valentines: Sending Valentine’s cards and eCards to widows and singles.  Also, ideas for small gifts to enclose in greeting cards.

Keep Those Cards Coming: My system or “work flow” for handling 200 greeting cards per year and more.

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NOTES:

• Visit the Correspondence Series for help on organizing your  greeting cards and more.
• Photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com