Print Envelope Labels for Holiday Cards

We've had a surprising number of responses from last week's newsletter about sending holiday greetings to your investors. This followup newsletter will provide a bit more detail for those of you that are printing mailing labels for your cards.

First of all, there are two reasons why we recommend printing labels rather than printing directly on envelopes. Many (but not all) envelopes that pass through a laser printer are damaged by the heat (the glue gets sticky and the envelope may end up partially sealed). And your printer typically can only hold 50-100 envelopes at a time. Most holiday mailings will be larger than that. Which means loading the paper tray multiple times. And sometimes the reloading of envelopes causes one address to be skipped. So you may end up with fewer printed envelopes than expected. Which means you then have to figure out which ones are missing and print a few individual envelopes. Labels on the other hand are much simpler. A few sheets of labels will be sufficient for even the largest mailings.

Need another reason to go with labels? Then apparently you've never had a big stack of printed envelopes fall over and had to pick them off the floor and sort them all. :)

One of the objections to using labels is that they are unattractive, particularly if your envelopes are a colour other than white. But a potential solution is to purchase clear (i.e. transparent) labels rather than the more typical white labels. When applied to an envelope, the clear label mostly disappears (much like transparent tape). Many people prefer this look over white labels on coloured envelopes.

The Two Step Process

In GoldMine, labels are simply a type of report. So printing labels for your holiday mailing is just a matter of activating a filter or group to select your recipients and then printing the desired label report.

Presumably you already have a filter that selects the recipients (e.g. Contact Type begins with "Client" AND (Client Type = "P" OR "G" OR "S") AND Master Record = "Yes"). So the first step is to activate your filter. Or if you need help building such a filter, let us know. It only takes a couple of minutes for us to build one for you.

Printing the labels is actually quite simple. Proceed as follows:

- from GoldMine's main menu, select File | Print a Report...

- in the Print Report window:

(a) select the desired label report by specifying Category Labels and Envelopes and then navigating to the desired label via User and Report

(b) select All contacts in the following filter or group and specify Active Contact Filter

(c) send the output to a window so you can inspect your labels

Do a test run first using a filter that just selects a few dozen contacts and print to plain paper rather than your sheets of labels. Place a sheet of blank labels over a printed page and hold it up to the light to satisfy yourself that the positioning of the printed labels is perfect. Keep in mind that some addresses are longer than others so include at least one contact with a multi-line address in your filter if possible (or include a dummy contact with a long address for testing). If the alignment is fine then go ahead and reprint on your sheets of labels.

So in theory it should take less than an hour to print your holiday labels from start to finish. But every year we have a few clients that spend days trying to get this right. So the following are some guidelines for avoiding the most common issues that arise in the course of printing labels.

Purchase the Correct Labels

GoldMine supports a few specific types of Avery labels. Avery 5160 labels are probably the most common. They are a size that works well on #10 envelopes but can also work fine on the somewhat larger envelopes typically used for greeting cards. There are a few other Avery labels supported, you will see the entire list when you open the Print Report window as detailed above (specify User public). But 5160s are the best choice for most of our clients.

Please purchase exactly the supported labels (i.e. either Avery 5160 or the clear versions which are Avery 7660 or 7666 depending on quantity). If your local retailer doesn't have exactly the labels you need, you should be able to find them online. Don't accept substitutes that a salesperson suggests are the same. The label size may be exactly the same but the position of the labels on the sheet may be different.

Over the years we've been asked many times to help a client with printing on unsupported labels. In each case, the time spent trying to produce a satisfactory result was much more expensive than the cost of simply buying the correct labels.

Select the Correct Labels in GoldMine

As already mentioned, GoldMine supports Avery 5160 labels (among others). The GoldMine report called Avery 5160, Primary Contacts will work fine on 5160s (or 7660/7666s) if you want the name on the label to match the name in the Contact field in GoldMine. But if you've taken the time to fill out the information in the Addressees and Dears screen in each recipient's Fields tab, you actually want the name on the label to match the name in the Addressee #2 field in that screen. So instead use the Investment Gold report called IG - Avery 5160 (using Addressee #2). If you can't find that report, contact us. We will either show you where it is or add it for you if it's been accidentally deleted.

Please note that although it is essential to use supported Avery labels, the appearance of the labels can be customized in a number of ways. For example, the font size and style can be changed. Or the recipient's name can be bold. Or the text can be centered rather than left justified. We can make these changes for you in just a few minutes.

Sort Your Filter by Last Name

If you are printing hundreds of labels, it is very important to specify a sort order in your filter (otherwise good luck finding a specific investor's label). To do so, proceed as follows:

- in GoldMine's main menu, select Tools | Filters

- in the Filters tab, right click on your filter and choose Properties...

- in the Filter window, select the Optimize tab and set the Sort Order to Last in order to sort by last name

- click the OK button to save your change

Now your labels will print sorted by last name.

Be Forgiving About Label Position

GoldMine's labels are preformatted and it is almost impossible for our firm to alter their format. Yes, we can make a label look a bit different by changing its font or other cosmetic settings. But for example there is no way to center the contents of a label vertically because some addresses include more lines of information than others. So don't fret if some labels have more blank space above them than below or vice versa. Or have more blank space to the left than the right or vice versa. Your clients won't care.

Hopefully this information will make your holiday label printing quick and easy. Once your team has completed this process once and spent a few minutes documenting the process in GoldMine's Knowledge Base, it should be a breeze to repeat the process in future years.

As always, please don't hesitate to contact our firm if we can be of assistance.