Samples of Acknowledgment Letters, Please!

Amelia Ketzle · July 2021

Hi, all!

We are having difficulties with generating acknowledgments for donors who gave more than one gift to different funds. The built-in Mail process in RE apparently doesn't handle this situation, so our Gift Processing team is having to manually merge multiple letters to the same donor into a single letter.

We are looking at building a custom report to hopefully streamline this for them, but we're realizing that we have a LOT of different variations of letters depending on different situations. We have separate letters with special wording for IRAs, Gifts in Kind, Stock/Property, Matching Gifts, 3rd party donations, athletics gifts, tribute gifts (IHO/IMO), and gifts with benefits.

I was hoping to consolidate some of these so the programming and maintenance of this custom report would be less onerous, but I'm having a hard time finding places where that can happen. Does anyone have either examples of their own letters they'd be willing to share, or could you share your org's practices for these scenarios in terms of how you acknowledge these gifts, and under what circumstances you have different acknowledgment wording? I'm wondering if we have an outlandish number of letter formats or if this is just what's necessary to acknowledge donors appropriately.

Many thanks!

JoAnn Strommen · July 2021

I feel your pain. Went from smaller, simple receipt process to an org with over 20 conditional merge receipt documents. Different text based on fund and payment method.

If it is one payment method, split between funds we do have one letter that includes text of thank you…gift…to the following areas of support:

<<Split Amount 1>> << Fund description 1>>

<<Split Amount 2>> <<Fund description 2>>

etc.

That can be done, it that helps.

Tom Klimchak · July 2021

Sounds like we do something similar to what @JoAnn Strommen does: We use a gift export to kick data into a Word document with a bunch of conditional statements that change the text based on gift type, tribute, appeal and funds listed. At one point we got clever and created five or six different blocks of acknowledgement text based on the gift ID, so our donors felt as though they were getting a custom letter each time they gave a gift.

We've actually dialed a lot of that back with our current leadership. Now our letters are fairly simple though the person who runs them does go through them and add in custom language from time to time for those donors that are special cases.

Amelia Ketzle · July 2021

Thank you, JoAnn! It does help just to know we're not an anomaly of conditional merge craziness! ?

Amelia Ketzle · July 2021

Thanks, Tom! Your first paragraph sounds like what we're striving to do now (with Crystal & Custom Reports). I'm hoping we can dial it back, too, but the people most motivated to do that right now are IT, because they're the ones having to build such a complex tool. And we (IT) probably shouldn't be crafting donor acknowledgment language! I was hoping if I could present some examples of what others are doing, maybe leadership would be inclined to approve some simplified version of it. I did start trying to combine some of our letters, but it quickly turned into something so generic yet so specific that it wasn't helpful at all (e.g., “If you made a gift to Athletics, [there is special tax language you need to have]. If you made a gift of stock/property, here are the share values. If you made a gift-in-kind, here is the description. And on and on…” Hence my question here to this group of brainiacs! ?

Samples of Acknowledgment Letters, Please!

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