Violence in Boston, because of its non-profit status, is mandated by law to send each donor a letter for tax exemption that includes their name, date of donation, and contribution amount. The team was given a template which we used to construct each letter. With the template, we were able to generate new letters for around 3,500 donors; we made the decision to divide the letters evenly among the five of us, giving us each about 700 letters to complete. Initially, we were under the impression of each member having to manually insert donor information into the letter template for 700 donors. We then looked into working with Microsoft Outlook to streamline the Mail Merge process. Mail Merge would allow us to simply use the template, insert general headings, and all the donor information would transfer over and email directly. Microsoft Outlook presented some issues, so we turned to Google. Essentially, the same theme for Mail Merge was used through a google add-on. With this, we set up a lifetime plan for VIB to use for their future donor letters; our 3,500 donor letters were completed and sent out on November 30 and December 1 2020.

With this collaboration, we learned more about the struggles of running Violence in Boston as a non-profit organization consisting of a small number of employees and a heavy workload. Given the many responsibilities Violence in Boston takes on, we could see how overwhelmed the organization is; the donor information we were given is from June, and we are only now in November sending the letters out. Additionally, while in the past VIB would fill out each donor letter individually and manually send each one out, we were able to set up a new system through a new Gmail account with which information is automatically filled in for each letter and sent out at once. We anticipate that since we set the organization up with a lifetime plan for this new system, it can consistently be used to compose and send the donor letters more efficiently and alleviate some of the overwhelming responsibilities of the non-profit.