How do I merge multiple gift amounts as one consolidated amount for year end acknowledgment letter

Naila Asif

Hi,

I am trying to establish a system so that we do not send acknowledgment letter to our recurring donors or who give cash gifts multiple times in a fiscal year. I have flagged all these as consolidated receipt type and now when I am trying to export through acknowledgment letter in mail task, I am not getting a consolidated gift amount although my query is showing the consolidated amount. Can someone help me on this?

Thanks

 Naila

JoAnn Strommen

Naila Asif:

Hi,

I am trying to establish a system so that we do not send acknowledgment letter to our recurring donors or who give cash gifts multiple times in a fiscal year. I have flagged all these as consolidated receipt type and now when I am trying to export through acknowledgment letter in mail task, I am not getting a consolidated gift amount although my query is showing the consolidated amount. Can someone help me on this?

Thanks

 Naila

My understanding is that the "consolidated receipt" function just works with Mail > Receipts.  It does not come into play with Mail > Donor Acknowledgement Letters.  I run them through receipt function at end of year for all our monthly donors. Works really well. (Side note-needs to be merge with single doc, not a conditional merge doc to generate consolidated receipts.)

On tab 2 of letters, did you change option to one letter per donor from one per gift?  That may change the gift amount to the total.  That's my first guess at troubleshooting.

PS the amount shown in your query is also not a factor for the letters, all query is doing is grouping the constituent records or gift records together.  The mail function settings will determine what data/fields are pulled from those records.

Melissa Graves 2

Naila Asif:

Hi,

I am trying to establish a system so that we do not send acknowledgment letter to our recurring donors or who give cash gifts multiple times in a fiscal year. I have flagged all these as consolidated receipt type and now when I am trying to export through acknowledgment letter in mail task, I am not getting a consolidated gift amount although my query is showing the consolidated amount. Can someone help me on this?

Thanks

 Naila

Are you in the US and sending this to be a receipt to be used for taxes? If so, now is not the appropriate time to do this. They ideally should get one in January consolidating the calendar year to coordinate with the tax year. Otherwise they will have to pull information from two receipts and they would be getting the second one after April 15th.

But, when you do this I have never been able to use the data from acknowledgements to do this. I have created a regular constituent export for these and done a mail merge in Word myself. I then use global change to change to mark the gifts as acknowledged.

JoAnn Strommen

Naila Asif:

Hi,

I am trying to establish a system so that we do not send acknowledgment letter to our recurring donors or who give cash gifts multiple times in a fiscal year. I have flagged all these as consolidated receipt type and now when I am trying to export through acknowledgment letter in mail task, I am not getting a consolidated gift amount although my query is showing the consolidated amount. Can someone help me on this?

Thanks

 Naila

I read this that you want to not receipt donor now but at end of year who's making multiple gifts now and during the year. 

Excluding it when running receipts will be be more of a trick.   

If the gift is in a batch with other gifts, you could mark the gift as 'do not receipt' then at year end change to 'not receipted' and receipt as usual.  The only other way I know of not including it would be query from the batch excluding that record or a query set for all the other records in the batch.   

Naila Asif

Melissa Graves:

Are you in the US and sending this to be a receipt to be used for taxes? If so, now is not the appropriate time to do this. They ideally should get one in January consolidating the calendar year to coordinate with the tax year. Otherwise they will have to pull information from two receipts and they would be getting the second one after April 15th.

But, when you do this I have never been able to use the data from acknowledgements to do this. I have created a regular constituent export for these and done a mail merge in Word myself. I then use global change to change to mark the gifts as acknowledged.

Thanks Melissa for your reply.

We are in US but we send Acknowledgment letter to our donors and do not use receipt option. As our fiscal year ends on June 30th, we need to send the acknwoldegement letters from January 1st to June 30th, and again on Dec 31st. You are right donor will have pull information from two acknowledgment letters.

I understand that I won't be able to get the consolidated amount with Mail Acknowledgment function and I will try to do  a mail merge in

Word as per your suggestion.

Thanks,

Naila

Naila Asif

JoAnn Strommen:

My understanding is that the "consolidated receipt" function just works with Mail > Receipts.  It does not come into play with Mail > Donor Acknowledgement Letters.  I run them through receipt function at end of year for all our monthly donors. Works really well. (Side note-needs to be merge with single doc, not a conditional merge doc to generate consolidated receipts.)

On tab 2 of letters, did you change option to one letter per donor from one per gift?  That may change the gift amount to the total.  That's my first guess at troubleshooting.

PS the amount shown in your query is also not a factor for the letters, all query is doing is grouping the constituent records or gift records together.  The mail function settings will determine what data/fields are pulled from those records.

Hi JoAnn,

 When you say Tab 2 of letters to change option to one letter per donor from one per gift, are you referring to Mail Acknowledgement function?

Thanks,

Naila

Melissa Graves 2

Naila Asif:

Thanks Melissa for your reply.

We are in US but we send Acknowledgment letter to our donors and do not use receipt option. As our fiscal year ends on June 30th, we need to send the acknwoldegement letters from January 1st to June 30th, and again on Dec 31st. You are right donor will have pull information from two acknowledgment letters.

I understand that I won't be able to get the consolidated amount with Mail Acknowledgment function and I will try to do  a mail merge in

Word as per your suggestion.

Thanks,

Naila

Our fiscal year is also June 30. But that means absolutely Zero to the donor. In order to be donor-centric and meet their needs - we send one consolidated receipt in January only which contains gifts from the full tax (calendar) year - technically two fiscal years for us but that means nothting for tax purposes.

JoAnn Strommen

Naila Asif:

Hi JoAnn,

 When you say Tab 2 of letters to change option to one letter per donor from one per gift, are you referring to Mail Acknowledgement function?

Thanks,

Naila

[quote user="Naila Asif"]

 When you say Tab 2 of letters to change option to one letter per donor from one per gift, are you referring to Mail Acknowledgement function?

Naila [/quote]

Yes, Donor Acknowledgement Letter > Tab 2 Fields to include - top thing on the tab.

Naila Asif

JoAnn Strommen:

[quote user="Naila Asif"]

 When you say Tab 2 of letters to change option to one letter per donor from one per gift, are you referring to Mail Acknowledgement function?

Naila [/quote]

Yes, Donor Acknowledgement Letter > Tab 2 Fields to include - top thing on the tab.

got it, Thanks

Rachel Bailey

JoAnn Strommen:

Naila Asif:

Hi,

I am trying to establish a system so that we do not send acknowledgment letter to our recurring donors or who give cash gifts multiple times in a fiscal year. I have flagged all these as consolidated receipt type and now when I am trying to export through acknowledgment letter in mail task, I am not getting a consolidated gift amount although my query is showing the consolidated amount. Can someone help me on this?

Thanks

 Naila

 

My understanding is that the "consolidated receipt" function just works with Mail > Receipts.  It does not come into play with Mail > Donor Acknowledgement Letters.  I run them through receipt function at end of year for all our monthly donors. Works really well. (Side note-needs to be merge with single doc, not a conditional merge doc to generate consolidated receipts.)

On tab 2 of letters, did you change option to one letter per donor from one per gift?  That may change the gift amount to the total.  That's my first guess at troubleshooting.

PS the amount shown in your query is also not a factor for the letters, all query is doing is grouping the constituent records or gift records together.  The mail function settings will determine what data/fields are pulled from those records.

 

We go about this slightly differently.  All of our recurring donors have Recurring Gifts that we mark with a Letter code that doesn't process through our normal acknowledgment procedure called "NO TY Letter."  Then in January we query on all donors who made Recurring Gift Pay-Cash in the previous calendar year and use Financial Reports > Annual Statement Report to send them a list of all their gifts.  Our Individual Giving Manager also does an export based on the same query to do a Word Mail Merge that acts as the actual tax receipt and sums up all their gifts.  Still trying to get folks to use Mail to the fullest   Once those are done I'll Globally Change the Recurring Gift Pay-Cash to Acknowledged.

Melissa S Graves

We have two separate letter codes - NO Letter truly means the donor does not want an acknowledgement/receipt and "Consolidated receipt" means do not run now - leave "not acknowledged" until we run in January with the consolidated receipt for the whole previous calendar year.


And we do this only once a year in January - despite the fact that our fiscal year ends in June - that month means little to our donors.

Gracie Schild

We handle this a little differently. The monthly donors and biweekly payroll deduction staff donors don't get thank yous during the year (and we tell them that when they first sign up) but we do the Annual Summary reports instead, for our larger donors and the pledge/recuring gift donors. The former have received their various thank yous during the year and the report is just a courtesy. The latter group are the ones who NEED the report. Once in the Annual Summary Report, it's all about choosing which gift types, and everything else is easy. We write a nice letter to go with it and enclose the actual report, so there's no need for fancy merging or modifying. My only problem is with the wretched formatting of the report! The footer is so short, you can't get more than "In-kind gifts not included. Call Gracie at xxx-xxx-xxxx for assistance." - even that may be too long! We don't have a huge numbers of sustaining givers, so we could do something more personalized if we wanted to, but we handle that in the letter rather than trying to combine the two. You know they're going to toss the letter anyway, and the form is what they're really after. It includes the gift amount, receipt amount, and totals the latter. 


Gracie