Understanding the Communicate Feature
PRINTOrganizer’s Toolbox contains all the information required to contact people stored in the database in a variety of different ways and at several locations. The COMMUNICATE module allows you to leverage the information stored in OT when emailing, faxing, phoning, mailing and visiting people. The creation of the communication is done through a wizard which prompts the user for each necessary piece of information.
To launch the communicate feature, click on the “House Visit” button from the main menu.
Communicate definitions can be saved and used later. In this example, you will select “New Communication”.
In this example, we will want to send people information via email or fax. Our rule will be that we will send them the information via Email if the contact has an Email. If they do not have an email but have a fax, we will send them the information via Fax.
Check the Email and Fax options and leave the rest blank.
Next select the order in which you want the communication to be sent. The only options we want to consider are work email, home email, and work fax. We will check only those boxes. We then use the up and down arrows to select the order of the rule. In this example, we put work email at the top because that is our first choice. In other words, we want people to get the communication via work email if we have a work email for the person. If we don’t have a work email, then we want to send it via their home email. Finally, if we don’t have a home email we want to fax it to their work fax.
Then you can use the Filter Wizard to select which people you want to select for the communication. (To find more information please visit the Understanding Filters and Change and Clear a Filter support articles in the NUWS Support Library.)
For now, we will assume we want to send it to all the people.
Communicate will then create a file for each type of communication you have selected. In this example, we have selected fax and email. Therefore a separate list of contacts will be created for fax and email. If you want to change the file format or the location and name of the file, click on the “Options” button for that file.
In the Extract field you can create a new more descriptive name for the file. Maybe “June Mailing” or “Press List” for example. On the next screen you can select some other options including the name of the “Communicate” definition as well as the location for which the file is stored. You can also decide if other Toolbox Users can have access to this Communication if they want to run a similar file in the future.
If you click on the magnifying glass to the right of the “Folder” field, you can change the location of where the file will be stored by using Windows Explorer to navigate your hard drive.
After selecting the location Communicate will tell you how many records were created for each file. In this example, we had no work faxes and 59 Email addresses.
Out of the 1782 person records in the Project, there will be one file created with 59 email addresses. Click the Finish Button.
Finally, you’ll get the message that the files “OT Demo” have been created and you can click on the “Yes” button to view the location of the file.
Double click on any of the files to see exactly what’s there. What’s the next step? You can then copy and paste the emails into your MS Outlook to send emails or import to your fax program. If you do not have a fax program, you have a list of people that need to be faxed to manually.
Tip: When emailing to a large group from Outlook or another email program, put the email addresses into the “BCC: section so the people on the email list will not be able to see who else the email was sent to.
Here’s a sample of the Email List that was created.
