Email acknowledgement letter through Raiser's Edge

Catherine Han

Hello, Now more and more donors like to receive email thank you letter instead of mail letter (non tax receipt). Raiser's Edge doesn't have this function except eReceipt. If you do send e-thank you letter only (non tax receipt) to donor for donation, can you share some ways you are doing?


Thanks,


Catherine

Melanie Lachcik

We use Online Express which will send an email acknowledgement letter for every online donation.  

Joan Schutt

We use Online Express acknowledgement and state in it that a receipt will be coming soon in the mail.

Catherine Han

Thank you for your information. What I am looking for is that people and organization make offline donation (checks/call in), and need email thank you letter without tax receipt (donation non-receiptable ).

Stacey Addison

We use letter templates, send these by email and then use the RE/outlook plug in to add the email as an action. Not the most straight forward but that's how we deal with offline so we can email acknowledgements as much as possible.

Catherine Han

Good morning Stacey, You mentioned that you send by email. Does that mean sending through outlook?

Daniel R. Snyder

Catherine Han‍, I think whether you use Outlook or Gmail you could export the data you needed and use the appropriate version of mail merge to send these letters. We have set this up with Gmail using the Yet Another Mail Merge add-on and it has been working well. Also, if you are have NXT the receipting function should be coming soon (I know they recently had to roll it back) and while that may be more geared towards receipts, you could set up templates for non-receipt letters as well with that process.

Catherine Han

Thank you Dan. I will set it up. More and more donors need it.

Terrie Meenach

Melanie, do you then also send an acknowledgement letter via US mail.? We use Online Express and donor gets thank you but we also send personal letter.

Lauren Fardella 3

I want to piggy back on this discussion. We have A LOT of donors that make their donations via PayPal, and PayPal does not properly acknowledge our donors...they just send a standard receipt. We would like to somehow grab all the donors that do not provide us with a mailing address and have an e-mail sent out to them thanking them.


How does everyone thank donors that provide NO mailing address?

Robert Flynn

We send E-Mail receipts routinely. As a side note, you are able to customize you PayPal receipts to some extent. We created a Batch Template for each type of donation (PayPal, EFT, Credit Card, etc.) to take advantage of the "gift subtype" field. We created attributes "Electronic Giver" (with values of PayPal, EFT, etc.) and "E-Mail Receipt" (which allows you to exclude these gifts from the normal printed receipts). You add the exclusion to your normal receipts parameter file. Then run the E-Receipts on a separate parameter file. We use custom receipts. The thank you letter is included in the e-mail text and the receipt is sent as a adobe acrobat attachment.

Lauren Fardella 3

We use the Gift Subtype PayPal, and just mark the e-mail only donors as Do Not Acknowledge....and we can definitely pull those into a query.


How do you actually send the e-mails out though?

Alan French

We send our thank you emails using Microsoft Word. There's a way to send mailmerged letters as emails via Outlook, rather than printing and posting them.

Lauren Fardella 3

What e-mail address do you use? A General one? Or from a specific person

Robert Flynn

First of all, you must configure RE to communicate with your e-mail server or service.



Then you create a parameter file in Mail->Receipts. I just did a "file save as" to use our existing printed receipts custom export parameter file. That way the e-mail receipt attachment looks the same as the printed one.

Then you create your thank you message on the eReceipts tab. Select the e-mail address you wish to use then click on merge. It creates an exception query so you can tell if one of the constituents failed to send (usually a missing e-mail address or something else in the record). It does a word merge just like the printed procedure but adds the additional e-mail send with an attached adobe acrobat receipt. THE DOWNSIDE is there isn't a test button in the config area to test you e-mail connection. So you have to do a test process to ensure the whole thing works.

Lauren Fardella 3

Alan French‍ I meat to respond directly, but when you send the thank yous via Word, do you send the e-mails out where does it come from? Is it a specific e-mail address for the organization or a specific person?

Lauren Fardella 3

This seems like a lot of work!! ?


Robert Flynn:

First of all, you must configure RE to communicate with your e-mail server or service.



Then you create a parameter file in Mail->Receipts. I just did a "file save as" to use our existing printed receipts custom export parameter file. That way the e-mail receipt attachment looks the same as the printed one.

Then you create your thank you message on the eReceipts tab. Select the e-mail address you wish to use then click on merge. It creates an exception query so you can tell if one of the constituents failed to send (usually a missing e-mail address or something else in the record). It does a word merge just like the printed procedure but adds the additional e-mail send with an attached adobe acrobat receipt. THE DOWNSIDE is there isn't a test button in the config area to test you e-mail connection. So you have to do a test process to ensure the whole thing works.

Alan French

We managed to get it to come from a generic email address - I think it's whichever one the user who's running it has set as their default account. It may well be a more complicated method than using RE's built-in receipting; we've never used that for some reason.

Karen Diener 2

I'm blown away by this! Thank you for outlining the steps. Sure it takes work to set up. What doesn't? And I've set up much more complicated things. It seems like you would notice the return on your time very quickly.


Excited to introduce this!


Karen

Karen Diener 2

Robert Flynn‍ do you need Queue to process these? I'm reading up on it and the documentation is a little confusing on that part.


Karen

Robert Flynn

Queue is NOT required. Build in function of Mail->Receipts. As I may have mentioned before, the tough part is the entries in Configuration->Business Rules->Mail Options. The guidance isn't exactly helpful in the user guide. Depending upon what e-mail server you are using, it will vary. Then of course there is the 800 pound gorilla, Microsoft, that may change something that effects usage. We used SMTP authentication method: "anonymous" for decades. Then it stopped working. We host our own Exchange Servers, so it took some trial and error to get it to work again. This is where a "Test Connection" function would be nice:-) However, the only way to test is to create a gift, set the parameter file to a the single record and run the process to see if a receipt is sent to the e-mail account in the record. If you are using an external e-mail service, then the set up should be similar to the account in outlook (outgoing smtp server, port, username, password). Try anonymous first. Hopefully, it will work for you and simplify the process. The computer world is much like a block and tackle. You can pick up an elephant but you have to pull a lot of rope to begin with.

robert badley

Does anyone find it strange that Blackbaud has seemingly been tone deaf to the age of e-communications. I find that the lack of straight forward functionality to send e-acknowledgements or e-receipts from RE is most frustrating.

Lauren Fardella 3

agree. They could probably easily add some kind of feature to OLX