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Offline fundraising

Your organisation may collect donations at events, through postal mailings, and by other offline methods. Money raised through offline activities needs to be manually entered into CiviCRM so that final reporting is accurate.

Offline fundraising in CiviCRM has three steps: creating your lists, creating your mailings, and manually entering Contributions.

Creating your lists

If you are familiar with CiviCRM's search capabilities, this process is fairly straightforward.

Go to Search > Find Contacts to create a list of records to receive your offline postal mail appeal. The list could include your entire database.

If you want to track the success of a mailing or who receives certain appeals, save the search results as a group. Use the check box to select all, then choose Group - add contacts or Group - create smart group from the Action dropdown menu. Later, you can mark everyone in that group as recipients of the appeal using Add Activity under the Actions dropdown menu.

To create letters for postal mailings, use CiviCRM's internal PDF letters - print feature, or export the list as a CSV file and use mail merge with a word processor.

To export a list:

  1. Select all records or a subset using the checkboxes, and choose Export Contacts from the Actions dropdown menu.
  2. Choose whether to Export PRIMARY fields or Select fields for Export. If you elect to export primary fields, the CSV file will be immediately generated when you click Continue. If you opt to select which fields you want to export, click Continue and a list of dropdown options will appear.
  3. Select the required fields. To save the list of exported fields as an export mapping for future use, check Save this field mapping.
  4. Click Export to generate the CSV file.
  5. Click Done when you have finished to return to the contact list.

Creating postal mailings

Once your spreadsheet is created, you can do a mail merge using any word processing software, such as OpenOffice, the free software word processor, to insert the fields you want in the letter.

CiviCRM can also create mailing labels. Perform the same search you used to create your list of recipients, then:

  1. From the Actions dropdown menu, select Mailing labels - print.
  2. Select the mailing label number. Decide whether to exclude people with "do not mail" checked in their privacy options (checked by default and recommended), and whether to merge two records with the same mailing address into one label. Merging is useful when mailing a household or organization and you do not want them to receive duplicate mailings. When the records are merged, each name at that address appears on its own line on the label.
  3. Click Make Mailing Labels to create a printable PDF document.

Note that CiviCRM prints labels in the order shown on the research results page in a column-by-column pattern.