ENEWS > SPRING 2007 > YOUR ACT! GURU

YOUR ACT! GURU
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS FOR USING GROUPS

If you don’t know how to create and manage groups, please click here.

Using Groups to Manage Events & Meetings
If you’re charged with planning events, ACT! can help manage your attendance lists.  It’s also a great tool for automating correspondence to your invitees and attendees. 

Understanding groups is essential to creating an event tracking system with ACT!.  You can use groups to track invitee lists, RSVP lists, and attendance lists.  Once you have classified contacts into these categories, sending them correspondence – like mass e-mails or letter merges – will only take a few minutes to complete.

Managing the Meeting Invitee Lists
For this hypothetical example, let’s assume that you are planning an event called Spring Conference.  I’ll take you through the process of creating an invitee list, sending meeting invitations, and marking contacts that have RSVP’d or attended.

Here’s how you could create groups for your Spring Conference event:

1. In the Groups View, click Groups | New Group.
2. In the Group field, type Spring Conference.
3. Click the Save button.  In the list of groups on the left, you should now see a group called Spring Conference. 
4. Right-click the Spring Conference Group and select the New Subgroup Option.
5. In the Group field, type Spring Conference Invitees.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 to create subgroups called

- Spring Conference RSVP
- Spring Conference Attendees. 

Here’s how you could add contacts to your invitees group:

1. In the Contact List view, click the Enable Tag Mode button.  You’ll find this in the middle of the screen at the top of the Contact List view.
2. Click once on each contact that should be invited to the event.  Doing so will tag the clicked contacts.
3. Click the Lookup Selected button. 
4. Click Groups | Group Membership | Add Selected to Group. 
5. Choose the Spring 2007 Invitees subgroup.
6. Click OK.

Sending Letters & E-mails to Group Members
In the Groups view, you can right-click any group and select the Create Lookup option to perform a quick lookup of all contacts in a group.  Because all of your meeting invitees are members of the Spring Conference Invitees group, you’ll be able to easily isolate the people you’d like to invite to the event.

After performing a lookup of the event invitees, you can run a mail merge or e-mail merge to send invitees information about your meeting. For e-mail, ACT! integrates with Microsoft® Outlook®.  Letters written to ACT! contacts can be sent directly to Microsoft Word.  ACT! uses the same templates for mass letters and mass e-mails.

Sidebar: You can set ACT! to work with Word and Outlook in Tools | Preferences. 

To create a template for a mass e-mail or mail merge:

1. Click Write | New Template.
2. A new blank template appears in your default word processor.
3. Design the template.

To create a mail merge invitation for meeting invitees:

1. Perform a lookup of contacts in your Spring Conference Invitees group.  The easiest way to do this is in the Groups view.  Right-click the group and choose the Create Lookup option.
2. The lookup of contacts will appear in the Contact List view.
3. Click the Tag All button.
4. Click Write | Other document from template.
5. Double-click the template that you created for your invitation letter.
6. You can create mailing labels for the current lookup by clicking File | Print.  From the Print dialog box, select the labels option and choose an Avery label template.

To create a mass personalized e-mail for meeting invitees:

1. Click Write | Mail Merge.
2. The first screen confirms that you are in the Mail Merge Wizard.  Click Next.
3. Choose the E-mail option and click Next.
4. Browse to the invitation template you created and click Next.
5. Choose the Spring Conference Invitees group and click Next.
6. Enter a subject for the outgoing message.  If you’d like, you can specify history creation options for the outgoing messages, and you can also attach files to the outgoing messages.  Click Next.
7. Select an option for dealing with contacts that have blank e-mail addresses and click Next.
8. Click Finish.

Test Your E-mail First: Once you click the Finish button in the Mail Merge wizard, an e-mail will be created (based on your invitation template) for each contact in the invitees group.  This message will be sent immediately, and you will not get a chance to preview.  To test the e-mail, send the message first to a small group of colleagues.

Note: If you are sending mass e-mails to large groups, you might benefit from the extra features included in the SwiftPage Email service.  SwiftPage seamlessly integrates into ACT!.  For more information, go to www.act.com/products/solutions/.     

Managing RSVP and Attendee Lists
You’ve used ACT! to manage your attendee list, and the program has made it a lot easier to send invitations.  Now the RSVPs are trickling in.  Some people call to RSVP.  Some send e-mails.  Some RSVP by mail.  You’ve gathered a huge paper list of RSVPs.  The Contact List view will make it easy to tag all of your RSVPs and add them to the Spring Conference RSVP group.

To create a tagged list of contacts that have RSVP’d:

1. Perform a lookup of the contacts in your Spring Conference Invitees group.  This will narrow your list down a bit so you don’t have to scroll through contacts that are not relevant to this event.
2. Sort the Contact List view by the Contact field.  This actually sorts the list by last name.
3. Make sure the Enable Tag Mode button is checked.
4. Scroll through your list and click each contact that is in your paper RSVP list.  To get to a contact quicker, you might type the first couple letters of the person’s last name in theLook for field.  This will take you right to that person in the lookup.
5. When you are done tagging RSVP’d contacts, click Groups | Group Membership | Add Selected to Group. 
6. Add these contacts to the Spring Conference RSVP group.

When you are on-site at your meeting or event, it may be useful to have a list of meeting attendees.  An easy way to produce this list is to perform a lookup of contacts in the RSVP group and then export the Contact List view to Excel®.  Within the Contact List view, click Tools | Export to Excel.  To modify the fields that display in the Contact List view, click View | Customize Columns.

Once the event has occurred, you can follow this same process to generate a group of contacts that actually attended your event.

Analyzing Group Lists
If you are using groups to manage events, you might benefit from purchasing an add-on product called Advanced Lookup by Groups by Exponenciel Software.  This program lets you perform lookups of intersecting or common contacts across multiple groups. 

So, for example, with Advanced Lookup by Groups, you could perform a lookup of all contacts that are members of the Spring Conference RSVP group and also the Fall Conference RSVP list.  Advanced Lookup by Groups is just one example of the hundreds of add-on products available that enhance the ACT! experience.  For more information on ACT! add-ons, go to www.actsolutions.com. 

USING GROUPS TO MANAGE A HOLIDAY CARD LIST - AND YOU SHOULD DO IT NOW!
You’re a few months into the new year now.  The aggravation caused by your 2006 holiday card mailer is almost completely blocked from your memory.  You won’t have to deal with that task for another eight months.

What many ACT! users don’t realize is that by using the groups feature, managing a holiday card list is something that really shouldn’t cause much end-of-year strife.  In this article, I’ll show you how to create a holiday card mailer now.  Then, throughout the year, your users can continually update the group membership.  At the end of the year, you’ll be able to isolate holiday card recipients and print labels in less than five minutes.

Creating a Holiday Card Group
Your first step in managing a holiday list will be to create a holiday card group.  You should do this now.  Don’t wait until the end of the year.  By creating your holiday card group now, you’ll get your users used to the idea of maintaining the group, and it’ll make it a lot easier to finalize the group membership in November.

Some companies even opt to create multiple holiday groups.  If you send different types of packages or cards to different customers, you could control each distribution list with a subgroup under the main holiday card group.  So, for example, let’s say you want to send a present in a box to select customers.  They might be in a subgroup called Premium Holiday List, while regular customers might be in a subgroup called Regular Holiday List. 

Here’s how to create a holiday card group:

1. Click the Groups button on the left navigation bar.  This will launch the Groups view.
2. Click Groups | New Group. 
3. In the Group field, type Holiday Card.
4. Click the Save button.  In the list of groups on the left, you should now see a group called Holiday Card.  (ACT! saves automatically once you leave the groups view, so you don’t technically need to click the Save button.  However, clicking the Save button refreshes the list of groups in the left pane and allows us to immediately start working with the group.)

Adding Contacts to the Holiday Card Group
Throughout the year, you should urge your users to actively maintain the holiday card group.  This way, at the end of the year, finding contacts that should receive a holiday card will be monumentally easier. 

Here’s how to add a single contact to the Holiday Card group:

1. In the Contacts view, click the Groups/Companies tab.  (This tab will show group membership information for the current contact.)
2. At the top of the tab, click the Add Contact to Group button. 
3. Highlight the Holiday Card group from the list on the left and click the [ > ] button. 
4. Click OK.  The single contact will now be included in the Holiday Card group.

Here’s how to add multiple contacts to the Holiday Card group:

1. In the Contact List view, click the Enable Tag Mode button.  You’ll find this in the middle of the screen at the top of the Contact List view.
2. Click once on each contact that should be included in your holiday card list.  This will tag all of the clicked contacts.
3. Right-click one of the tagged contacts and choose the Add Selected to Group option.
4. Choose the Holiday Card group.
5. Click OK.

Using the Holiday Card
At the end of the year, you can easily perform a lookup of all contacts in the Holiday Card group.  Once you have looked up the contacts, you could print mailing labels or envelopes for the subset of your database.  You could also easily export the list to Excel to send to a mailing house.

Here’s how to perform a lookup of contacts in the Holiday Card group:

1. In the Groups view, right-click the Holiday Card group.
2. Choose the Create Lookup option.  Your current lookup is now everyone in the group.

Here’s how to print envelopes or labels for the current lookup:

1. Perform a lookup of contacts in your Holiday Card group.
2. Click File | Print.
3. From the list of icons on the left, select either Labels or Envelopes.
4. Click Print.
5. Make sure the Current lookup option is selected.
6. Click OK.

Here’s how to export the holiday card recipients to Excel:

• Perform a lookup of contacts in your Holiday Card group.
• Click View | Contact List to view your lookup in the Contact List view.
• If necessary, click View | Customize Columns to add fields to the Contact List view.  Only fields that are currently showing will export to Excel.
• Click Tools | Export to Excel.

Edward Kachinske
Innovative Solutions
ACT! Certified Consultant