Year End donation reports

One of the challenges of the Year End Reports is mailing Tax statements to those who have moved from the ward. When we know they are moving I give them a donation envelope and ask that they return it with their new address information. However sometimes people move and their new ward requests their records. When this happens we have no forwarding address and must hold the tax statements. Is there any way that MLS could notify wards of where a family has moved to? Currently we only receive a printout stating that a family or individual record has been "removed".

gdbrown wrote:One of the challenges of the Year End Reports is mailing Tax statements to those who have moved from the ward. When we know they are moving I give them a donation envelope and ask that they return it with their new address information. However sometimes people move and their new ward requests their records. When this happens we have no forwarding address and must hold the tax statements. Is there any way that MLS could notify wards of where a family has moved to? Currently we only receive a printout stating that a family or individual record has been "removed".

Great idea! What about creating an email system that let's the member know they have a message? They could log in and update the info themselves. There could be an auto responder that asks the member to update their address by sending the info to the old ward. Perhaps each ward could have their own email address for these types of applications. When a person moved they would most likely still have the same email address so messages could follow them more easily than regular mail would.

One problem we have is when a record is removed from MLS there is no lingering information as to what their email address was. This also applies to the Ward Web site. When a record is removed from MLS it is also removed from the member list on the web site. Unless we keep an ongoing list of email addresses offline from these two systems we will not be able to use email to contact members who have moved. While both MLS and the Web site have profile information which allows for an email address they are not correllated, MLS has one address for the household while the Web site allows each member of the Ward to have their own address. Clearly there was a different intent when these fields were added.

As a side note; it would be a real benefit if there was an easier way to download member information from either MLS or the Web site directly into "Microsoft Outlook" addressbook since that is what most member I know use for their email application. I have tried to use the .csv file but have difficulty getting all the information into the right fields. It would be nice if Vcard inormation could be downloaded for all households in a wardat one time. I prefered the Palm file data myself as I kept it updated weekly and it included member callings and HT/VT information for the family. This was a great help to the Bishop when a question came up about what calling an individual had or who was this members VT or HT, no need to run back and forth to the computer in the clerks office.

gdbrown wrote:As a side note; it would be a real benefit if there was an easier way to download member information from either MLS or the Web site directly into "Microsoft Outlook" addressbook since that is what most member I know use for their email application. I have tried to use the .csv file but have difficulty getting all the information into the right fields. It would be nice if Vcard inormation could be downloaded for all households in a wardat one time. I prefered the Palm file data myself as I kept it updated weekly and it included member callings and HT/VT information for the family. This was a great help to the Bishop when a question came up about what calling an individual had or who was this members VT or HT, no need to run back and forth to the computer in the clerks office.

The problem with Outlook importing more than one vCard record at a time is a well-known problem with Outlook. See this thread for details.

As for the CSV import into Outlook, you might want to take a look at the Outlook Import article on the LDSClerks wiki.

gdbrown wrote:As a side note; it would be a real benefit if there was an easier way to download member information from either MLS or the Web site directly into "Microsoft Outlook" addressbook since that is what most member I know use for their email application. I have tried to use the .csv file but have difficulty getting all the information into the right fields. It would be nice if Vcard inormation could be downloaded for all households in a wardat one time. I prefered the Palm file data myself as I kept it updated weekly and it included member callings and HT/VT information for the family. This was a great help to the Bishop when a question came up about what calling an individual had or who was this members VT or HT, no need to run back and forth to the computer in the clerks office.

Also, I'm working on a way to get vCards into Outlook with the photos from the Ward website included. I think you found the thread already, but here's the link:

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=47

gdbrown said:

One of the challenges of the Year End Reports is mailing Tax statements to those who have moved from the ward.

I think it's admirable for clerks to want to get the year-end donation tax statements to each and every member who contributed, but it's not expected. The policy in the MLS help says--

Distribute or mail the statements to the donors. If you cannot locate a donor, file
the statement for one year.

The ultimate responsibility to receive the statement lies with the member himself. I know when I have moved in the middle of the year, I've called up the old ward and had them mail me the statement for the part I contributed there.

My advice would be to do what you can and then keep the others for one year in case the member really needs to his or her statement.

smithgw wrote:My advice would be to do what you can and then keep the others for one year in case the member really needs to his or her statement.

Or better yet, don't even print them for those who have moved until they ask for it.

Greggo wrote:Or better yet, don't even print them for those who have moved until they ask for it.

However, the policy in the MLS help file that smithgw quoted does say to "file the statement"...

mkmurray wrote:However, the policy in the MLS help file that smithgw quoted does say to "file the statement"...

I would still consider the data in MLS as "filed."
The person who wrote the help file was probably considering that the clerk would indiscriminately print tax statements for every donor rather than pick and choose like I prefer to do.
I'm all for saving paper when there is no perceived benefit over electronic data.

One advantage of printing them all is then you'd have some idea of who you have and haven't sent statements to.

Facebook is a great way to keep track of those who have moved out of the ward.