Generating, Organizing Acknowledgement Letters without getting bogged down

Tammy Crossman · April 2019

I am fairly new to the non-profit world so the sheer volume of acknowledgement letters has been, to say the least, overwhelming! Can anyone give me suggestion on how to streamline this process. It takes me 18 minutes from input to copies to filing for one acknowledgement. There has to be a better way.

John Heizer · April 2019

If you have it timed to 18 minutes per letter then it sounds like you are generating the letters one-at-a-time instead of using the Mail module to generate groups of letters.

JoAnn Strommen · May 2019

At 18 minutes/letter there's no way to stay ahead of the game. You said you're new to non-profit. Does that mean you're new to RE?

I'm assuming you have basic knowledge of RE. Do you enter your gifts using batch? IMO, that's step one to using RE efficiently. You can have constituent bio data in the side window to verify if anything needs to be updated/edited. If you are using acknowledgment vs. receipt you can select your letter during batch entry.

Are you using Mail > Acknowledgements to generate your letters? Even if you enter gifts one at a time on gift tab, you can run your letters en masse by selecting gift date or other criteria. You should be able to set up your letter to pull in/merge name/address/gift amount. Run all your gifts for the day/several days/in a batch. Create a merge document for printing your envelopes.

If you want to get more elaborate you can do conditional merges based on say fund and have different text in letters or you can use "if/then" statements.

Not knowing where you're in your experience/knowledge of RE it's a little difficult to know how detailed to be.

Adrienne Baumann · May 2019

Defintely use the merge options if you aren't already. :-)

Tammy Crossman · May 2019

I am new to RE and the nonprofit world and unfortunately came into all of this with no one to train me on the ins and outs. After 11 months of "figuring it out on my own" we are switching databases to RE. I am working my way through the training at this very moment and am looking forward to learning how to use the batch, mail merge, and other features that will hopefully help to make this process less daunting.

To answer some of your questions. Yes. I was entering each gift individually and merging each letter and envelope on a single basis because the program we used wasn't easy to use and I was more successful at individual merges than "batch" merges as far as the proper information being pulled from the database. I do understand that my fields may be messed up in my templates but everything I've tried wasn't working. It is my hope that RE will be much easier to understand and work with resulting in higher volume of letters.

Elizabeth Perron · May 2019

Hi Tammy Crossman‍, Glad you are getting some answers as you switch to RE...

I searched "merge letters" on the home page of community and found a few more posts with some "tips" that you might find helpful. I hope you will find some time to check them out.

Also moving this post to the RE community so others can benefit from the RE specific knowledge. Feel free to add more questions to this post as you continue, new eyes with new questions can sometimes pull out tips from our most experienced users that everyone can learn from!

In harmony,

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Management Team

Alan Cole 4 · May 2019

Hi Tammy, I think that you will like RE better than your old system...I have been using it for nearly 16 years now. As mentioned by the other respondents, you will want to take the classes for gift entry and mail merges. This will drastically reduce your time per gift. Six to seven minutes is an achievable target, with a good gift entry process. Even less with a really efficient process and some practice.

Tammy Crossman · May 2019

Thank you, in the 18 minutes I included
copies, scanning, and filing both electronically and hard copy
files. I’m hoping to eliminate the hard copies but I’m waiting to
hear about company policies before I can cut the cord.

Hopefully I can find a better process for that
portion of it as well. Any suggestions?

Tammy Crossman

Development Administrative
Assistant

ARISE

635
James Street

Syracuse, NY 13203

Office:
315-671-2909

Email: TCrossman@ariseinc.org

www.ariseinc.org

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Alan Cole 4 · May 2019

Tammy,

Aside
from training and practice, the most important thing you can do is
to document your processes. Then follow them. This is true for
records, notes and actions as well as gifts. If you find areas that
can be improved, then tweak your process document and retime the
process. If it is faster than keep it, if it isn’t then rethink
it.

I
have attached a few examples from a previous organization, as I am
currently revamping the processes at my current organization. You
can use them as a starting point if you like. While there are
many similarities in what information different organizations
require, there will always be some differences. When adapting these
processes, I would recommend starting at the desired end result
(the letter or report etc.) and then work backwards to ensure each
data point you want to collect has a home, and that the field you
are using to collect it in can be used as an output field in the
final product.

Finally,
keep copies of these processes for yourself. Just like you don’t
have a documented process now, you might not have one in your next
position either. Your copies will give a starting point to begin
again.

Please
feel free to reach out if there is something I can help you
with!

Hope
this helps,

Alan J.
Cole,
bCRE-Pro

Database
Manager

Scholarship
Manager

Normandale
Community College Foundation

9700
France Avenue South, Bloomington, MN 55431

(952)
358-8148
– Direct

(612)
325-3467 – Mobile

JoAnn Strommen · May 2019

As you said...

Give it time as needed but evaluate why/what you need the hard copies for. Even the electronic files - do you save each letter separately? We enter our gifts using batch, generate our letters by batch and just save the entire file. I add batch # at end of file name. We have never needed hard copies. And very, vary rarely the electronic copy of a letter but each to find file using batch number on the gift record.

I always find it more efficient to do like tasks at the same time. So, if I have to add a number of constituents, I do a constituent batch and add them all. Then in the gift batch I can use Tools > Group Add to pull all the records in using one move.

I think you'll find RE if used as designed to be much more efficient than your previous software. The recommended classes would be quite helpful. If you don't have access to training at least check out videos in knowledgebase and/or youtube.

Generating, Organizing Acknowledgement Letters without getting bogged down

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