Emails - without attachments - that are personalized?

[Brianna]

I am working on our annual pledge drive, and I would love to find a way to incorporate the envelope numbers prior year pledge information in the body of an email. I am not looking to email an attachment with the pledge letter (though based on my research - that might be my only option right now).

Any help on how I can incorporate data fields into the body of an email (so that each email is personalized with name, last year's pledge amount, etc) would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!
Brianna Kempe
Treasurer, MVUUF

[NeilZ]

I am working on our annual pledge drive, and I would love to find a way to incorporate the envelope numbers prior year pledge information in the body of an email. I am not looking to email an attachment with the pledge letter (though based on my research - that might be my only option right now).

Any help on how I can incorporate data fields into the body of an email (so that each email is personalized with name, last year's pledge amount, etc) would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks!
Brianna Kempe
Treasurer, MVUUF

This sounds like a 'mail merge' type of thing, however, I'm not sure that's feasible outside of an attachment, or specialized email software. That said, I've done something like this a few years ago, but we just mailed the letter.

FWIW, some advice, mailing a letter on Church letterhead is probably a much better way to contact your congregants

Anyway, what I did was create a custom report that extracted that data from the database, and put it in a comma separated values (CSV) files, which I then used in the mail merge for both the letter and the envelope.

It took some trial and error, but it worked fine. Unfortunately, that was a few churches ago, and I don't have access to that report to see how I did it!