Calendar Year Summary Letters and donations from DAFs

Hi All,

We will be sending letters to our donors with a list of their 2017 donations for tax purposes. Because some donors write checks as well as give through a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), the summary letters are ending up being very complicated as we are not allowed to provide tax receipts for DAFs. Instead of a simple merged list of donations in a letter, we are having to research each donation to see if it was made through a DAF and make sure to remove the DAF gifts. Does anyone else have an easier method such as a Tax Statement that would allow us to list every donation in the calendar year, including those made through a DAF?

Thanks for your help!

Miki

The Tech Museum of Innovation

Parents
  • Miki,

    We use a custom field in the gift record to denote a DAF/IRA gift and when it come tax letter time I have a sql query that pulls all donations, except DAF/IRA. The query breaks the gifts into Annual Fund, Endowment, Special/Sponsorship and Events. It's by no means a perfect solution as it take work to get the summaries ready, but it excludes DAF gifts. If you didn't want to exclude them, but wanted to recognize them, you could still use a custom field and to denote them on the letter.

    Melissa

  • Hi Melissa, did you create your own custom field or did you have to ask Tessitura to create it?  Where does this custom field live?

    Miki

Reply Children
  • We created it ourselves. It's an entry in T_KEYWORD and TR_GOOESOFT_DROPDOWN because we made ours a dropdown so we could pick from a list where the gift came from (Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.). The field is on the Custom Data tab in Contributions.

    The set up in T_KEYWORD looks like this:

    Description: GCF Dropdown (it's named for our local DAF group, which is our largest contributor)

    Data Type: String

    Edit Mask: Alphanumeric

    Detail Tbl: vs_contribution_with_initiator

    Detail Col: !.custom_8 (thought you can make this any column number 1-10)

    Ref Tbl: tr_gooesoft_dropdown

    Ref Idcol: id

    Ref Where: the Code # from TR_GOOESOFT_DROPDOWN once we create all the entries. 

    ref sort: id

    Category: Contribution

    Use for list: Contribution

    Multiple Value: blank

    Custom ID: 8 (which coincides with the customer field we used)

    All other columns were left blank