Best Practices - NetCommunity Acknowledgement

Dodie Stogner:

Just wondering if anyone has a best practices or policy/procedure on the NetCommunity gifts and acknowledgements.  Does the email acknowledgement suffice or do you send one in the mail also, what about receipts for gifts over $250?  We are BRAND NEW to NetCommunity and still learning our way through all of the processes.  Thoughts on your process would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!!

Dodie - We send the automated acknowledgement email when they make the gift online thru BBNC. We following that up with our standard snail mail acknowledgement within 48 hours which is a letter/receipt combo that goes to all levels of donors. We don't do special receipts for over $250, but those donors get an additional thank you call from our AG dept.

Melissa Graves:

This should have nothing to do with BBNC other than knowing if it contains the elements that the IRS requires to qualify as a legal tax acknowledgement. You would refer to IRS publication 1771 to know what it must contain and then can check in BBNC to see if you can get all of those elements into your email.

If you can get BBNC to provide all of the legal elements for a tax acknowledgement, many people who give online like the "green" element of giving online and getting only an email receipt. Others lose them and ask for a paper copy on April 14th. If it can include all of the proper elements, then under or over $250 matters not. If you can't get BBNC to properly acknowledge gifts (usually the sticky point is QPQ receipts), then you may be required to do paper receipts (or worse - manual email receipts).

If you are a Penelope Burke follower, then $250 above or below means nothing in terms of thanking your donors, everyone gets thanked equally. If you have a gift stewardship plan that you are implementing for offline donors (calling new donors to thank them, gift officers calling or sending notes to their assigned donors, etc.) then it should apply equally to online donors unless they have given any contact exclusions such as no phone calls or no paper mail.

 We use an acknowledgement email for all BBNC transactions.  We edit it for each form. This form is fine for most transactions, but you really can't make it that personal.

But for donations over a certain amount, we like to send out a letter as well - this is really so that our director can personally thank them.

We put columns for letter code, acknowledge, and receipt in the batch and have a letter code of "online CC" for most gifts and mark all as receipted.  For those we want to send a letter for, we put the appropriate code in the letter field and mark it as not acknowledged.  Then letters are generated with the other acknowledgments.