Receipting for Recurring Donors

Adam Hampton

Our organization is moving toward providing a slightly different experience for our recurring donors. One of the ways we would like to do that is by adding some additional information on our daily gift receipts. Do many of you provide receipt letters that are slightly different for your recurring donors than for other gifts? If so, how do you do it?

For context, we have marked our recurring donors with a particular donor type attribute/custom field to distinguish them. Also, we do our eReceipting and receipt mailing all through RE, using the newly changed processes of Rich Text merge for email and exporting for Word merge on our own computer for mail.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

JoAnn Strommen

@Adam Hampton, when you say recurring donors are you talking monthly recurring?

For our monthly donors we do not issue receipts with each gift. They receive consolidated receipt at year end. We try to reach out to them with a thank you mid-year.

Recurring annual/quarterly donors receive the same thank you/receipt as any other donor.

If you have coding with receipt process you may be able to do additional if/then to insert special text.

Adam Hampton

@JoAnn Strommen, thank you for your reply. For the most part, I do mean monthly recurring. We do have some donors who consistently give at regular intervals that may not be once a month, but we still want to acknowledge them as special. And we do give year end consolidated receipts, but additionally give an acknowledgement/receipt for each gift as it is given to say thank you.

We were hoping to keep the receipting process as streamlined as possible and just add in a few additional statements for those with the Recurring tag we have given. But I don't think I have any ability to code that in. I'm purely working within the framework of what RE provides.

As is, my best solution is to duplicate the mailing workflow and filter the recurring gifts out specifically for the letter with the additional info. I was just hoping people were utilizing a simple solution to keep it all in one workflow.

Aidan Lambert

@Adam Hampton, if I understand your question correctly, I think you might be able to do this by exporting a csv/xlsx with all of the needed information and then performing a conditional mail merge in word that uses the custom attribute you set up to specify recurring donations.

You might be able to get some more information from these Blackbaud articles about mail merge workflows:

Suzie MacMillan 2

Adam Hampton:

Our organization is moving toward providing a slightly different experience for our recurring donors. One of the ways we would like to do that is by adding some additional information on our daily gift receipts. Do many of you provide receipt letters that are slightly different for your recurring donors than for other gifts? If so, how do you do it?

For context, we have marked our recurring donors with a particular donor type attribute/custom field to distinguish them. Also, we do our eReceipting and receipt mailing all through RE, using the newly changed processes of Rich Text merge for email and exporting for Word merge on our own computer for mail.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Hi Adam, we use the letter code when entering gifts, which we can then use for conditional formatting in the TY letter portion of the receipt. For example, when a recurring donor give's a one-time gift (and they do not request consolidated receipts for both one time and recurring) the letter code is MD (for monthly donor), and its adds a note to the bottom of the TY letter thanking them for also giving monthly

example:

{IF{MERGEFIELD Letter} = "MD*" "P.S. Thank you also for your very generous monthly support! insert what ever thank you text you want here etc." ""}

We also use the same type of conditional formatting for the body of the TY letter via appeal codes, our appeal codes tell us what channel they gave thru (mailing, email etc), and we use the same IF merge field. If someone gave to a mail out appeal about species at risk protection, then they will be specifically thanked for giving to that appeal. This way we can receipt everyone at once, but have different wording in the receipt →its a single merge, with conditional formatting, not a conditional merge that produces multiple word docs

We aren't using the Rich Text for e-receipts, we are also exporting and using word and using the adobe add-on “Merge to Adobe PDF” which does exactly what RE did before the changes, sends an email with a PDF attachment of their receipt - this way I didn't have to change any of our merge docs

Hope that helps a bit