Email Management for the purpose of emailing tax receipts

I'm with Angie.  I would have serious reservations/objections on this idea.  Personally, I have several email addresses that I use for different purposes.  If I mailed in a donation and didn't include an email address and the org found an email for me and appended it to my record, then started emailing me, I would be rather irritated.  If I even saw the message, as I often find messages I'm expecting to receive in the Spam folder.


However, we do do this in the opposite direction.  If you make a donation online to the organization, you get the confirmation email and you also will receive an acknowledgement letter in the mail.  And, if you give >$250 in a calendar year, you will receive a mailed tax summary letter in January of the following year.  Regardless of how you donated.

Hi Nicole,


We have recently moved to e-receipts and so far it's working well. It does actually add extra work in some ways but so far our donors have responded very favourably and are replying back to us with thank you notes and other words of encouragement surprisingly frequently! 


For us we didn't do an email clean up prior, we have taken a chance and just gone with the email address that is on file. So far I have only had one company come back saying that the person we emailed the receipt to is no longer with them. They provided me with a different email address to send to and all is well!


We are not having any double up of receipting as once someone is emailed a receipt then they are marked as receipted and acknowledged so when I run the paper copies afterwards it doesn't pull those. It has meant that we (as in I!) have changed our entire process of doing acknowledgement letters though and that has taken some getting used to!


As a caveat to the following steps, we include our tax receipt on the bottom of the acknowledgement letters so there are a few steps that those of you who do separate receipts won't need to do here...


My steps are to first run all the e-receipts first. I would have preferred to do this as consolidated receipts but for some reason I couldn't build a consolidated receipt file without errors, so I made all the e-receipt letters individually and now run them one by one. It sounds very very time consuming but once you get the hang of it it's not too bad.


I then run a receipts preview on all records to generate receipt numbers for those that don't have them yet.


I then run the donor acknowledgement letters which pulls all the letters that haven't been acknowledged yet. 


Because our letters have the receipt on the bottom the letter type denotes if someone receives a receipt or not. 


It's working well for us at the moment and as I said, we've had great feedback and engagement, even from those that send us a cheque and then we send them an e-receipt! 


Hope that helps! Happy to answer any other questions!

Carley.