VSys One: Volunteer Management Software

Alternate Language Variants

In order to accommodate volunteers who speak different languages, VSys lets you set up specific letter templates in those languages. In the example below, the letter template is defined for use by French speakers.

French alternate

This by itself is not that useful - when doing mail merges, you'd have to do one mail merge for English speakers, then another for French speakers. VSys can help you there, too. Always do the merges with your primary (in this example Trainings upcoming) template, regardless of the language of the recipients. By setting the field Alternate-language versions for merges above, when VSys does a mail merge with the Trainings upcoming template, VSys will try to find the best letter template for each recipient, switching back and forth among templates so that each recipient gets one in his language if available.

Primary letter

Steps in this task

1. For each letter template, set the Usable by what languages field.
2. When that letter needs to be sent to people in different languages, define alternate-language versions of the same letter, and set their statuses to Active or Alternate language. Within those templates, define them as alternate language versions of the primary template as above.

Automatic template selection

When VSys is asked to merge a letter template with a person, it looks for an appropriate template based on these rules, then stops when it finds a match:

• Selected template for the person's communication language, if present, or
• Alternate-language templates for the person's communication language, or
• Selected template for the person's primary language, or
• Alternate-language templates for the person's primary language, or
• Selected template for the person's other languages, or
• Alternate-language templates for the person's other language.

If none of these match, VSys will use the original template that you selected.