Donor Acknowledgements/Letters

Options
Peggy Smith
Peggy Smith ✭
Ancient Membership Photogenic First Reply
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
I work for a not-for-profit hospice. I'm interested in hearing how your organization handles donation letters and acknowledgements. Do you process the letters through the constituent's record in RE? Do you have letters currently set up? Did you set them up through mail merge and use the RE merge fields? If using the RE mail merge fields, do you use donation amount, tribute and tribute relationship? If not, what fields do you use. We're in the process of reviewing our current letters and manual processes to streamline through Raiser's Edge. Curious to hear how others handle this process.
Tagged:

Comments

  • JoAnn Strommen
    JoAnn Strommen ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Peggy Smith:
    I work for a not-for-profit hospice. I'm interested in hearing how your organization handles donation letters and acknowledgements. Do you process the letters through the constituent's record in RE? Do you have letters currently set up? Did you set them up through mail merge and use the RE merge fields? If using the RE mail merge fields, do you use donation amount, tribute and tribute relationship? If not, what fields do you use. We're in the process of reviewing our current letters and manual processes to streamline through Raiser's Edge. Curious to hear how others handle this process.

    Am not with a hospice but would sure recommend you utilize the functions in RE Mail to save yourself tons of manual work.  We do 99.9% of our development related letters through RE.  We do not have the tribute module so don't know what added fields that gives you for mail merge but it should have all the fields you need.   The donation amount is generally included in the letter/receipt to the donor but not included in letter acknowledging tribute/memorial/honorarium received.  (There have been other posts on that subject you can pull up by search.) 

    We enter our gifts by batch and then run receipts/letters/bills for that batch using Mail.  Can't imagine doing it letter by letter.  It will take a bit of work to get your letters set in Mail but so worth it.  With conditional merges you can generate several different letters at once. 

    Hope you get posts from some using tribute module to further encourage you in streamlining.

  • Aldera Chisholm
    Aldera Chisholm ✭
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Photogenic
    Peggy Smith:
    I work for a not-for-profit hospice. I'm interested in hearing how your organization handles donation letters and acknowledgements. Do you process the letters through the constituent's record in RE? Do you have letters currently set up? Did you set them up through mail merge and use the RE merge fields? If using the RE mail merge fields, do you use donation amount, tribute and tribute relationship? If not, what fields do you use. We're in the process of reviewing our current letters and manual processes to streamline through Raiser's Edge. Curious to hear how others handle this process.
    Hi Peggy, We run all our letters through RE's Mail function, this flags on the acknowledged tab on the constit record. I will occasionally run single letters from a constituent records, but I prefer to use the mail function as it is cleaner and easier in the long run. I use all those fields - for example I will thank them for the specific amount of the gift, and the name of the tribute. We choose not to use the tribute relationship unless we are on very close terms with the donor. The great thing about using Donor Ack. Letters through the mail feature is the ability to have a letter template with conditions - so you can have a few variants of the letter and have them automatically run. Cheers Aldera
  • Lindy Steen 2
    Lindy Steen 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply
    Peggy Smith:
    I work for a not-for-profit hospice. I'm interested in hearing how your organization handles donation letters and acknowledgements. Do you process the letters through the constituent's record in RE? Do you have letters currently set up? Did you set them up through mail merge and use the RE merge fields? If using the RE mail merge fields, do you use donation amount, tribute and tribute relationship? If not, what fields do you use. We're in the process of reviewing our current letters and manual processes to streamline through Raiser's Edge. Curious to hear how others handle this process.

    We are a hospice and we batch our gifts, choose the letter in batch, then produce our letters through "mail".  We use a conditional mail merge so we are able to selct the appropriate letter for each type of donation. We use merge fields for the amount of the gift, date, and name of the person being honored or remembered.  Makes gift processing very efficient. We use the same process for the acknowledgement letters- we do not include the amount of the donation.  We are also able to print out all of our envelopes for the thank you letters and acknowledgement letters by using "mail".  I would suggest reading through some user guides or tutorials to help with getting your letters and the conditional mail merge set up

    Lindy Steen

    HPH Hospice, Hudson, FL

Categories