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How do you handle the situation where you want to send a letter to multiple children in the same family?  Say I'm running labels for the enitire youth ministry and Sarah Jones is in Sr High and Susie is in Jr High.  Now I want to print a label ( or envelope) to Sarah and Susie Jones.  Actually, I want the label to read "To the Parent's of"  on the first line and the girls (combined) following.  By running the labels or envelopes through the printer twice, I can accomplish the "To The Parent's of" thing, but not how to combine the family names.  F1 support has simply said that I can't do that!  Anybody have any ideas? 

I can tell you the way I do it for our youth ministry. There is probably a better way to do the combined names on a label and I would be interested in what that is as well, but here is what I have been doing.

 I have all of my kids in a group and select a mail merge. I create a mail merge with labels and before inputting the address I add, "To the parents/guardians of:" then I input the address merge. This will give me each child on a label with the "To the parents/guardians of:" When I am putting the labels on the envelopes I just stick one one top of the other with the "To the parents/guardians of:" and the child's name showing above the second label. Again, probably not the best way to do it, but it gets it done.

Lauren

If you run one of the reports that lists the household and then lists all the children in the same cell (you can choose children within a certain age range in the reports I've seen), you can use mail merge and add that cell before the address block.

The only other thing I would know to do is add the siblings in separate columns next to each other in the report and then do the mail merge, but depending on how many names you have that could be cumbersome to have to do each time.

 

andrea

Thanks for replying- can you give some report numbers to try?  This sounds interesting, but, quite frankly ,I have alot of trouble finding the report that gives me what I want!   Appreciate any help you can give!  We have far to many names to do it manually.

The one I know of right off hand is P2000E.  It pulls households with a certain status that have children in the age range you specify.  Under Additional Filters is the option to display the children in the report and that will put them in their own column.

 

You could also try M3033E if you want to pull by parent assignment.

Do you know if there is a report that lists the children together that has "participant assingment" as a filter?

M1411E is Households where someone in the HH has an assignment to the activity and then lists every child in the family with their ages, but in separate columns from each other.  You would have to sort by all the ages to get the exact kids you wanted.

 

You might send over a report request to have them build you what you need.  Or alter an existing report to include all the children in an age range.

Hope this helps,

Andrea

Hi,

We use M1600L - it's labels based on who has attended an RLC.  We had them create it for us along time ago for that purpose.  Other people have asked for additional things on the report - but it still does what we need it to do.  We use it to send mailers to all of kids.  You can multi select RLCs (so I can make a list of all kids in 1st-3rd grade with all kids in the same household together, with "To the parents of" stated at the top).   I know you wanted assignment based - but hopefully everyone has attended at least once.  When you go into the report, at the top is message header - Enter "To the parents of" in this box (no more putting it through the printer twice).  Then select "Distinct individuals by household" - this combines all the kids onto one label.  The only thing is that it will include and print 'one time visitors' - don't know why.  Go through the Activity - RLC selections.  Then the Activity Date Range is how long to want it to look back at the attendance.  Under attributes select "none".  Make sure to goto "Additional Filters" and change the "attended more than" box to whatever you want.  If I want everyone who has attended in the last year: I put "0" in this box, and select "past year" in the Activity Date Range.

Hope this helps,

Lark Corbitt

StoneBridge Church, The Woodlands, Texas

You are a life-saver and WE SO APPRECIATE YOU!!!!!!!!  Thank you for taking the time to respond.  I'm sure you have helped others, too.  The "first time visitor" thing is an issue, but I think we can work around it.  Again, GOD BLESS YOU!!!!!!!!