How to send donor acknowledgement letters to soft credit recipients

Amy Wu

Hi, 

How can I build a query of showing soft credit recipient address information and soft credit gift amount, so I can use it donor acknowledgement mail merge to create thank you letters? is it possible to do that? 

 

Thanks,

Amy

JoAnn Strommen

Amy Wu:

Hi, 

How can I build a query of showing soft credit recipient address information and soft credit gift amount, so I can use it donor acknowledgement mail merge to create thank you letters? is it possible to do that? 

 

Thanks,

Amy

Amy,

Query is a grouping tool and you just need your query to group together the gifts with soft credits that you need to acknowledge.  I can't imagine that you want to pull old gifts into your query so you will need some criteria in query or mail merge. Or that you want to send them to all spouse records if you SC spouse gifts.  In mail you can select gift dates to use, what fund/appeal etc. Lots of options on filters tab. 

We run our soft credit letters per gift batch so that's my selection for what records to include.  That means I don't have to create the query of gifts to SC acknowledge. Can't really tell you what criteria will work best for that without more info for selecting what gifts to include.  Maybe it's all records with gifts this month - that you can just for all records in Mail general. 

Is there a reason you need to see the soft credit recipients' address and SC amount before running the thank you letters?  Mail will pull these fields in for you.  Assuming that's what you want in the query I would use the donor acknowledgemnt mail process to create either an output query or an export in excel if I needed to review that data.  Don't know that you can pull SC in regular query function.  Just check box to create an output query, click export and then say "no" when asked if you want to mark as acknowledged.  You won't want to say 'yes' until you do the mail merge.  You'll get query and an excel file with the data.

Another factor: do you run HC donor acknowledgement letter thru mail and select 'yes' to mark gifts as acknowledged?  If so, you may have another issue in that the gifts are already marked as acknowledged and it will not pull them unless they say "not acknowledged."   You may have to change that field also.