Receipt Examples from other nonprofits

Hi Amy, there are a couple of different ways you could go about managing receipts/acknowledgments. In my past organizations we generally used a conditional merge through the Acknowledgment tool in the Mail process, creating different templates based on the "Letter Code" field. Our letters were generated on a 24-48hour frequency with about a dozen templates being updated quarterly. For our organization there was never a gift too small to receive an acknowledgment however gifts of $100+, $500+ and $1,000+ also received a hand-written thank-you note from a member of the Development Team, depending on the person and amount given. As for different receipts for different gift types, that's the beauty of the conditional mail merge process, you can create as many versions that you want, based on whatever factors you feel are important. Keep in mind you would need to have the Letter Codes available and create different letter templates for each, or establish conditional text within MS Word. If you'd like to learn more about setting those Letter Codes up I'd encourage you to register for the Generating Exports session, which will walk you through all of that as well as a few other cool tips. For more information about the Conditional Mail Merge I'd encourage you to sign up for the Mail 2 session, where  you'll also learn about Appeal Cards and Reminders. For more information about the conditional text within MS Word I'd say that Mastering Targeted Communication might be a good session to look into. I hope that this is helpful, if you want more information about training's feel free to reach out to me directly and I can share that information with you.


Jordan Brown

jordan.brown@blackbaud.com

It sounds like you're looking at creating acknowledgment letters. Acknowledgment letters also serve as a receipt. Like Jordan and Jill, we also use mail merge for our letters. Up until last summer we had been creating thee letters through a word merge outside of Raiser's Edge. Eventually someone from another org came by and taught me how to use the Mail Merge function in conjunction with Letter Codes and it has made a dramatic improvement in how quickly, correctly, and easily we can't get out many different acknolwedgments in one sweep.


Also like Jordan, we try to update our "General Acknowledgement Letter" quarterly. Also, every gift gets acknowledged and we strive to acknowledge them within 48 hours of receiving the gift. For our in-kind gift donations, we use a different letter- by different I mean that the only variation from the gen ack letter is that we don't have the gift value on there per IRS guidelines. We're a mid-size community organization and tend to have folks that either donate cash gifts or in-kind. Furthermore, we have two major events a year which require a  new pre and post event template, and one minor quarterly event that requires a new post-event letter for each event. In regards to tribute gifts, we alter our general acknowlegment letter to be a little lighter in the introduction and closing paragraph with mention of the tribute. If they gave us a person to send a card to, we also include a line in the first paragraph that says something like, "we will also be sending a card to [name] at [address] to notify them of your wonderful gift."


We have our Executive Director hand sign letters for gifts of $1000+, our Development Director sign for the $250-999s, and our EDs canned signature for the ones under $250 (except for special circumstances.)