Email contribution notifications to fund reps

Nancy Williford

We use RE donor acknowledgement letters to run a conditional mail merge to thank donors for their contributions to our funds.  Then we manually send email notifications to fund representatives letting them know a gift has been made to their fund and the name/address of the donor in case the fund rep would like to thank them as well.  We would like to figure out a more streamlined process for the fund rep notification.  Does anyone have any suggestions for doing this from within RE?  Or any other suggestions? Thanks for your input.


 

Jamie Heslin

Great question! I can think of a few ways to accomplish this, depending on how advanced you are in RE, or how simple or complex you want to go. The two best options in my opinion are using action tracks or the dashboard.


Action tracks are wonderful because you can incorporate them into your moves management process. It's a bit difficult to explain succinctly, but essentially, if you have a specific suggested action or list of actions that should happen when a gift is made, you can build a map of automated actions that will assign to the staff person you choose based on their relationship to the donor. As an example, you can build an action track that assigns thank you calls to each staff member. After you commit your gift batch, you can use a query to assign the action track to the constituents who have made gifts. You can build the action track so it automatically adds a reminder to your staff person's Outlook, and it will also build an action in RE so that the staff person can then log in to the constituent record, make the call, and then hit "complete" on the action. It's a bit complex to learn and set up, but would save you tons of time once it's ready to go.


Alternately, you can set up dashboard panels based on funds for each staff person. Are you familiar with the dashboard in RE? You can add a panel to each staff person's RE dashboard that will track and detail recent gifts to their fund. I think the Recent Gifts panel would be perfect because you can set date and fund parameters so that the staff person will only see recent gifts to their fund. Although this will not generate emails for the staff person, it will be very easy for them to check their dashboard on a regular basis for recent gifts. An additional benefit is that they can click on the gift in the panel and it will link them directly into the gift so they can see more details.


If you're not an advanced RE user, either of these solutions might take some reading in the knowledgebase and time to get them working, but either way, I think they would save you time and energy in the long run. If either of these ideas sound promising, I can give you more details about how they work.


Hope that helps!

Nancy Williford

Thanks for your input.  The action tracks won't work for what we're trying to do, but I thought the dashboard might have potential.  We don't want to assign a gift to a staff person to then contact the fund representative to let them know about the gift.  We have one staff person that notifies all fund reps about all gifts received and we're trying to make that process a little easier.  Currently we export the gift records for a specific date through mail merge donor acknowledgements.  Then we manually find the email for the fund rep for the fund that received the gift, open Outlook, copy and paste a standard notification and then copy and paste the donor name/address.  It's not difficult, but cumbersome and time consuming.

I thought if the  recent gifts dashboard would show the fund with a hyperlink to open the fund record to then get to the relationship for the notification contact, we could go that route.  But the recent gifts dashboard doesn't hyperlink the fund, only the date and donor.


Still exploring options.  Thanks.

Jamie Heslin

I think I better understand what you are trying to do. It could be that action tracks would work for you after all. If your fund representatives have constituent records in RE, then you may be able to build action tracks to notify them via Outlook (this would require having a constituent record, marking the record as solicitor, and potentially creating a user profile for each rep, even though they would not actually use it log in to RE). I take it that the representatives do not themselves have access to RE? Here is what I imagine this could look like:


Fund A - John

Fund B - Sally

Fund C - Tom


You have received a few gifts to each fund. You can build an action track for each fund rep. So, you have Track A, Track B, and Track C. You run a query after your gift batch is committed that searches for all gifts to fund A today. Then you use that query to apply Track A to that query. Track A is built so that it sends an Outlook notification to John whenever a new action is added. I'm not sure that the automated Outlook notification would provide many details, but it would certainly provide the donor name. Then your fund rep could follow-up with a request for more detailed info for the gifts s/he is interested in stewarding. If you receive many gifts, and your reps only thank select donors, you could limit your original query on fund A gifts to gifts over a certain amount. Then, wash, rinse, and repeat for each fund.


Regardless of the more minor details, it would be pretty simple to run queries and globally apply action tracks after each gift batch, which would then automatically notify each rep. This process could also function as a way of tracking when each rep was notified of which gifts. That said, I still recognize that getting this built could be complicated or daunting, so no pressue. I build action tracks frequently, so if you decide that you want to test this idea, I'm happy to answer questions about the process of building them.

Nancy Williford

Very interesting.  I don't use action tracks so I didn't understand how they would apply from your first response.  But I do understand what you're saying in your second response.  A few questions come to mind.  Is it possible to preview the emails before they are actually sent so that the message could be modified?  Or is it possible to setup an email message "template" for what will be sent?


Thanks for this answer.  I will explore it further.