Multiple Gifts on one Thank You Letter

Matt Page

We often need to thank one donor for a number of different donations in one go. For example, they might have been done a sponsored event for us and are soft credited on a number of smaller gifts. We produce our letters one by one from the individual gift rather than all in one batch.


Historically (because we had been using packages wrongly) the person doing the letter was easily able to look on the relevant 'package' on the constituent's tab and get the amount from there. It seems a bit imperfect to me, but it seemed to work for them. BUT now we have switched to doing appeals the correct way this no longer works. They can, of course, just use a calculator to some them up, but this is a bit prone to error and gets more probblemmatice the more gifts there are. So, naturally, I was wondering if there was a better way. 


I'm not great at the gifts and thanking parts of RE, but I was wondering if there was a function for it to automatically sum up the unacknowledged gifts and drop that in to a single letter? Any ideas/tips/leads I could try following?


Thanks,


Matt

JoAnn Strommen

Matt,


Using consolidated receipts will give a lump sum for any gifts that meet the filter in your Mail > Receipts set up.  However, you can't use conditional merge receipts - needs to be just one document.  We use that function for receipting monthly donors.  Works well and can include multiple funds.


That will work for Receipt function but don't think it will for Donor Acknowledgements.  Knowledgebase is down so I can't check there to see.


 

Paul Speck 2

Our typical method is one recept per gift but during a conference a constituent may give multiple gifts over a short period of time.  For those times we use the method describe in Article Number: 75636.

Ryan Hyde

For these situations, we often only set one gift up to receive a TY letter, and we add a note in reference to change the $ total to $X. This works so long as the gifts are entered in the same batch and the data entry person is aware of it all. We pipe our gift reference field into all of our TY letters and highlight it so that when we're processing our mail, we can easily spot letters that need to be altered when reviewing everything in Word. 

Matt Page

Thanks for all your replies. I think I've found a way around the issue that caused the initial problem using custom views, and will have to revisit how to streamline the thanking process further down the line.


Matt