rather than postal mail. This has saved us thousands in postage and even
more in time saved stuffing and processing envelopes. I'm posting for two
reasons: First, to let you know about two tools we've found to be very
useful for sending email merges. Second, to ask you to reply with any tools
or services that you've found to be useful for electronic communication.
Specifically, if you've found any tools or services that can be used to
securely send custom information in a user friendly way. While it's fine to
use email merges to send pdf schedules (see below) we are not comfortable
doing this for things like school debit card invoices, advisor reports,
parent login information for our web portal, etc.
Here are the two tools we've found to be very useful for sending email
merges:
*World Merge*
http://www.coloradosoft.com/worldmrg/index.htm
World Merge is an inexpensive and very easy to use email merge program that
can pull data from pretty much any source including Excel, Access, or an
ODBC source. We use a SQL view to tie right into our Blackbaud database to
pull parent email addresses. It works very much like making a Microsoft Word
merge document. It can create either plain text or html emails and you can
specify a unique files to attach to each message. For example, we could use
World Merge to send pdf schedules to parents for parents day with the
schedule attached as a pdf. Optionally, you could include the schedule as
html code stored in a field in the data source and then include the schedule
in the body of the email. Another thing we use it for is sending internal
notices such as notices from the Dean's Office to students cc'd to advisors
for common infractions.
World Merge can act as an SMTP server sending documents directly to the
Internet, but it works best if you set it up to relay mail through an
existing SMTP server especially if you have spf records set for your domain.
We have other tools for sending email merges such as Blackbaud's NetMail,
but WorldMerge is so easy to use and flexible we've found that it is the
tool we reach for most often when we want to send an email merge.
*ARTS PDF Split Pro*
http://www.artspdf.com/arts_split_pro.asp
At $3K, this product is pricey but it has already paid for itself. In a
nutshell, it allows you to split any PDF based on content within the PDF.
For example, we used it in conjunction with World Merge to send pdf
schedules to all students. We print student schedules to a pdf file making
sure to include the student name (or number) in the PDF. We then used ARTS
PDF Split Pro to split the PDF whenever the student's name changed and to
name each file after the student name on the pdf. In a few seconds we
produced one pdf for each student with file names equal to each student's
name. We then used World Merge to send these pdfs to all students. While
students have the ability to see their schedules online, many prefer the PDF
and there are other things we use ARTS PDF for that we have no other way to
distribute electronically. Lastly, the other thing we use this for is to
break things like student grade reports and transcripts into separate PDF
files which can then be easily imported into our document management system.
I hope you find this information useful and if anyone has found a good
solution/service to sending email merges securely I'd love to know about it!
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
http://www.peddie.org
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