Year End Letters

Cody McManigal

My organization wants me to generate a year end letter to every constituent that has donated this past year and they want it to include the total amount donated and the funds that they were designated for. Any idea on the best way to go about this? 

Jason Black

Cody McManigal:

My organization wants me to generate a year end letter to every constituent that has donated this past year and they want it to include the total amount donated and the funds that they were designated for. Any idea on the best way to go about this? 

I think RE has a canned report that can do this, but I've never used it.  We built a custom report in Crystal, formatted as a simple letter with the typical "no goods or services" language, describes benefits in case of QPQ, and lists all cash gifts by date, fund description and amount.

JoAnn Strommen

Cody McManigal:

My organization wants me to generate a year end letter to every constituent that has donated this past year and they want it to include the total amount donated and the funds that they were designated for. Any idea on the best way to go about this? 

Cody, you don't have any bio details for what type of org you work with.  Just wondering about a year end letter for every constituent. Are you talking hundreds or thousands?  Do you have to deal with benefits?

 While you might have what you think is fairly straight forward request, it isn't that easy to pull from RE.  Have you searched/read previous posts on year end letters?  If not, I'd recommend it - you'll get some ideas to try and see some of the difficulties.  You may need a custom letter as Jason suggested.

That said, in RE their are two canned reports that are possibilities for you.  Reports > Financial Reports > Annual Giving Statement (AGS) or Constituent Giving History (CGH).  The AGS is one record per page but provides info you need. We've used it as second page when we needed upon request the details of constituents giving for the year.  We didn't attempt to merge info into letter.  Personalization limited to header/footer.  Exporting data to excel or something would require lots of manipulation to merge back into a letter.  CGH is list of every payment from each constituent.  Again, taking it to excel requires massive manipulation to merge.

If I had to do your project, I would look at running an export using gift summary fields (this can be overwhelming if you've got lots of funds).  I'd export to excel and merge to a word doc with conditional fields to pull funds with gifts.  Lots of work and not sure all parts are possible as I've only done printing all the $ funds I exported, didn't need to exclude some.

Mary Roundtree

Cody McManigal:

My organization wants me to generate a year end letter to every constituent that has donated this past year and they want it to include the total amount donated and the funds that they were designated for. Any idea on the best way to go about this? 

There is a canned report in RE called an Annual Statement report.  There is very little customization, but it does the job.  We use it as a second page to a letter that is generated for a more personalized effect.  You bring over your gift types, choose your columns and make sure you choose "Receipt Amount" in your columns to get a total, choose your address information and do a little customization on the headers in the format tab and your're good to go.

PS - You may need to do a query to group your donors together for the report.

Thanks,

Mary R

Director, Development Services

Rheumatology Research Foundation