Power Automate & RENXT Giving Statements

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Hallie Guiseppe
Hallie Guiseppe
Fifth Anniversary Kudos 4 Name Dropper Participant
in SKY Developer General Discussions

Hi, Amazing Citizen Developers!

I wonder if there is a way to generate the giving statement in RENXT as an attachment to an email in Outlook. The only thing holding my team back from using the giving statements directly from RENXT is that we can’t attach a cover letter. One workaround is to create an email “cover letter” and attach the giving statement.

Alternatively, I am considering a basic version of the giving statement using a mail merge function based on acknowledgment flows already out there. It won’t be as pretty, but my team would prefer that over no cover letter.

Thanks for your thoughts!

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Comments

  • Dan Snyder
    Dan Snyder
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management Name Dropper

    @Hallie Guiseppe This should be possible to my knowledge, but wondering if you are looking to have them all sent out automatically on some date in January or just a one-off as requested (ie. an add-in)?

  • Hallie Guiseppe
    Hallie Guiseppe
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 4 Name Dropper Participant

    @Dan Snyder We are looking to send them out as a batch by email in January. We will mail some statements, which is easy enough because the statements can be created in bulk and then downloaded to print.

    For the ones we want to email, I'm hoping there is a way to pick up the download from a folder and attach it to an email. I'm stuck at how to instruct power automate to pick up a specific file and attach it to a specific constituent for emailing. The file name of the giving statement is the “Individual Display Name” in RENXT which may be enough to go on, but I'm not sure where to start.

  • Ben Lambert
    Ben Lambert
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Hallie Guiseppe this is a great question that has prompted some discussion internally, so thanks for posting! We currently haven't exposed any APIs specifically around the receipting/giving statements area but this is something the team is interested in doing.

    Any details or particular requirements around what you'd need (specific parameters, request/response shapes, etc.) would be helpful and I can pass those on to the team for their discovery efforts.

    Once we expose some APIs, we'll be able to incorporate new functionality into the Power Platform connectors (or you could use the “Send an HTTP request” action once that connector is released, which should be around the first week of January due to Microsoft's EOY change freeze).

    All that said, depending on your requirements you might be able to manually implement a Power Automate flow that fetches gift details and produces a similar document/email/PDF to what you see in the product. You'd be hand-rolling all of the logic though, so this may be undesirable.

  • Hallie Guiseppe
    Hallie Guiseppe
    Fifth Anniversary Kudos 4 Name Dropper Participant

    @Ben Lambert Thank you so much for your reply. I attempted to create a Power Automate flow that would accomplish this task but ultimately found it easier to use Microsoft Word Email Merge. I located a resource made available by IMNOSS that provided a macro to allow Word to include attachments in an email merge. I have tested the merge, and it works well for this situation.

    I have one suggestion regarding your question about the particular requirements needed to make this happen in Power Automate. Create an endpoint to the display name configured in settings.

    The first complication I encountered was extracting the "display name." I was able to work around this issue by reconfiguring my settings to use fields I could access through RE Constituent endpoints. The configuration pictured below worked.

    3ce113f9047d9f1c7bf073a9ebf4e5d0-huge-co

    I tried a few different ways to get the system to look for the file and attach it to the email. Due to my inexperience with the tool, I was unsuccessful and decided to go a different route for time's sake. (I need to have this done by the end of January.) The visual of the flow I built is pictured below. It DID NOT WORK, but I'm sharing it to share my basic logic.

    1. Set up:
      1. Download Giving Statements for a list of constituents from RENXT and save them to SharePoint
    2. Using Power Automate:
      1. Get a list of Constituents
      2. Compose file Name to match downloaded .pdf
        1. Requires that I also get the primary education information for constituents
      3. Get file content from SharePoint using the file name

    Send an email to each constituent with their specific file attached.

    ca6a5dd31cbdf245a405463d6c60d040-huge-fa

    I hope this is useful to the team. Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my post.

    Happy New Year!

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 5 PowerUp Challenge #3 Gift Management Name Dropper

    @Hallie Guiseppe
    I'm not completely sure what the issue is about “display name” for you, hard to provide any feedback with your route.

    The main approach for us would be to use PA flow for donor statement in its entirety. This way we can customize the donor statement however we wish it to look. Also a drawback (according to our finance team) is that the donor statement on RE NXT does not handle stock gift.

    This is in plan for 2023 for us, so for now the development path is:

    • get all constituents that have gifts in a given year
    • loop through each constituent
      • get the gifts of the constituent for that year
      • populate word template with gift details
      • make into PDF
      • attach to constituent record as attachment
      • if emailable (has email and not opt-out of email receipt) send the email with PDf as attachment
      • if not emailable, save the PDF into a destination folder in SharePoint for snail mail handling

    I think this route will work well for you as you can copy some of the code you previously did.

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