Checking that acknowledgment letters have been sent

KC Bridges

Hi all!


Do any of you have automated systems for telling if a thank you letter has been sent to your donors? I was experimenting with some queries that show me all the gifts and all the contacts which have the type "thank you letter" in them, but even then I have a lot of gifts which don't require a thank you (such as many of the monthly donors), and in that case I find myself sifting through tons of gifts to try to see whether the few that require thank yous have actually been thanked. 


Thanks in advance for any advice you have on how to automate this process for all donors!


--KC

erin russell

We use a query. This displays all the gift types we are interested in acknowledging (we have a large membership program, so those are handled a different way). We can then select Do not Acknowledge or Acknowledge, or even better Acknolwedged.


For major gifts this isnt a ton to sort - 10 to 15 gifts a day. 

 

Gabriele Wessendorf

If you don’t mind reading my long answer covering a few other points maybe this would help or give you some ideas.  The process in which we add gifts to the database and produce acknowledgements is organized and methodical.  The process entails much more than acknowledging the donor for their gift.  It includes financial checks and balances as well.


All mail is opened at the front desk by someone other than the person adding the donations to the database.  The person at the front desk creates a batch which is essentially a bunch of checks that equals a bank deposit.  The batch is assigned the next number in sequence.  This is her part in the process.  One batch equals one deposit.


Next comes the coding of each donation.  In other words, what bucket should this money get dumped into?  This is handled by the head of the organization and the head of development, however, me the person who actually adds the donations to the database, is very well versed in the way we allocate funds and our donors but policy dictates this middle step.  When all input of the batch is done I run a report equals the deposit.  If it doesn’t equal it is corrected.  Since each batch is assigned a number I run a query and report to see that it totals and to give me other information for other functions.


At some timely point, after several batches, I run an extraction of those batches to produce the thank you letters.   I do this by querying that last group of batches and I create an Excel file.  Each row is one gift that gets a thank you letter and it is also coded to indicate which letter it should produce.  You can do this a few different ways.  You can do this at entry time in the database or after the extraction in the Excel file by adding a column and the data.  I do not do thank you letters inside the database because there is a product and tool that handles mail merges very well and since we try to customize our thank you letters this product far exceeds what others try to mimic and is easier to work with.


I know what batches make up each Excel file I create since I have a system for that and all my mail merge output is saved with the Excel file so when someone calls for a thank you letter, months later at tax time or says they did not receive their letter, I can look it up, go right to it and produce the letter by printing it again.  I could post an entry to each gift in the database indicating a letter was produced and I did consider doing this but I don’t.  I still have my documentation.  Each gift transaction has the batch number it belongs to in the database.


It’s also worth mentioning that at the end of each month I produce a monthly report of batches that gets reconciled by me against our deposits and in addition our accountant uses it reconcile to the bank statement.  Producing acknowledgements although important is not the only function doing entry in batches produces.


Keep in mind too, that this process does not cover donations handled by online event systems we use.  This is handled by other staff members and they do those acknowledgements.  This data from the event system eventually finds its way into the database and I have my methods for reconciling this financial data as well at import time.

Rachel Rosen

KC Bridges:

Hi all!


Do any of you have automated systems for telling if a thank you letter has been sent to your donors? I was experimenting with some queries that show me all the gifts and all the contacts which have the type "thank you letter" in them, but even then I have a lot of gifts which don't require a thank you (such as many of the monthly donors), and in that case I find myself sifting through tons of gifts to try to see whether the few that require thank yous have actually been thanked. 


Thanks in advance for any advice you have on how to automate this process for all donors!


--KC

Hi KC!


This is a phenomenal question and there are certainly many ways to go about this. One way would be to create a set of UDFs for the transaction called "Acknowledged?" with values of "Acknowledged, Do Not Acknowledge, Not Yet Acknowledged" and another field called "Acknowledge Date" with a date value.


This way, as gifts are entered, and you can use the Letter field to indicate which thank you the donors should receive, the gifts are either labeled Do Not Acknowledge for those that do not need a thank you, and Not Yet Acknowledged, until you do the mail merge from your query of gifts. When you're done with your mail merge in eTapestry's Communications, you can simply do a Mass Update and mark the field "Acknowledged" with that day's date.


In doing so, there's no superfluous Excel record keeping (minimizing also the risk of human error), and all information lives in one spot. 


Hope that helps!


Rachel 

Elizabeth Rossi

First, I just wanted to start out and ask, do you use RE Mail? If so, the acknowledgements are all automated thru batch, you begin by sorting your checks, add a new batch, enter all the gifts and then assign a letter code for each ind gift. You then commit the batch and use RE mail , I use a query for that particular batch and is date driven, go to RE Mail and include selected query in your donor acknowledgement letters (be sure to set up your tabs to pull the letters the right way with addressees and salutations) and hit merge and all the letters that you assigned a letter code will be marked acknowledged. I save each file under the day that i committed the batch so I can go look up a letter if i need to. I save them by batch number, ie: 16-145 for 8/15/2016 file. That seems to be the easiest.

Elizabeth


KC Bridges:

Hi all!


Do any of you have automated systems for telling if a thank you letter has been sent to your donors? I was experimenting with some queries that show me all the gifts and all the contacts which have the type "thank you letter" in them, but even then I have a lot of gifts which don't require a thank you (such as many of the monthly donors), and in that case I find myself sifting through tons of gifts to try to see whether the few that require thank yous have actually been thanked. 


Thanks in advance for any advice you have on how to automate this process for all donors!


--KC

 

Maggi Junor

We use a query to pick up all the letters for a specific time period.  Then when I do the pull for the letters I create a journal entry that tells me the letter has been sent and I update the transaction to read Letter Sent.  That way I have a journal entry and the query will not pick up that transaction again. I also have a entry under letters for No Letter Needed.

Maggi Junor


KC Bridges:

Hi all!


Do any of you have automated systems for telling if a thank you letter has been sent to your donors? I was experimenting with some queries that show me all the gifts and all the contacts which have the type "thank you letter" in them, but even then I have a lot of gifts which don't require a thank you (such as many of the monthly donors), and in that case I find myself sifting through tons of gifts to try to see whether the few that require thank yous have actually been thanked. 


Thanks in advance for any advice you have on how to automate this process for all donors!


--KC