DonorThankYou with Membership Category as Sort

Kristy Williams

Hi - very new to BB without support in house. Trying to streamline letters and add more flexibility. We have 3 different membership categories and send 3 different thank you letters as "gift" acknowledgements since the benefits are different. Currently we have to pre-sort our memberships by type - enter them by type - run the letters by type and then move on to the next category. This requires multiple handling of the papers. I would like to be able to enter them as they come in and run the letters at the end of the week. If the donor report had a filter of Membership Category I could do this. I played around a bit and wrote a query to capture the new or renewed by category but do not know how to link this data to the DonorThankYou letter or have the letter use that query output as a database. I realize this is very elementary and if you could direct me to an appropriate tutorial or guide me I would appreciate it!

JoAnn Strommen

Kristy Williams:
Hi - very new to BB without support in house. Trying to streamline letters and add more flexibility. We have 3 different membership categories and send 3 different thank you letters as "gift" acknowledgements since the benefits are different. Currently we have to pre-sort our memberships by type - enter them by type - run the letters by type and then move on to the next category. This requires multiple handling of the papers. I would like to be able to enter them as they come in and run the letters at the end of the week. If the donor report had a filter of Membership Category I could do this. I played around a bit and wrote a query to capture the new or renewed by category but do not know how to link this data to the DonorThankYou letter or have the letter use that query output as a database. I realize this is very elementary and if you could direct me to an appropriate tutorial or guide me I would appreciate it!

Kristy, sounds like you may have Membership module, so not 100% sure if you have other options, but what it sounds like to me is that you need to set up a conditional merge gift acknowledgement letters.  You can have 1 batch or one run of your gift acknowledgement letter and it will merge the appropriate letter for each condition.  All you need is a field in your data that the merge can sort on for which donor gets which letter say your membership catagory.  If you can pull that field in as a field to use for the letter (doesn't matter if you actually print it in letter) then you can base your conditional merge on it. 

I'd start with this knowledgebase solution: How to prepare donor acknowledgement letters (thank you letters) (includes demo)  BB519.  I think this should give you most of the how to.  

You can play with it and see what it can do.  Just click 'no' for marking gifts as acknowledged until you are ready to actually run the merge.  If you click 'yes' each gift record is changed to "Acknowledged" and it's a bit of a pain to try to change them back.