We've been interested in moving gift acknowledgments out of the paper world for a while, but nothing like cancelling an entire season and your whole work force going digital-only to help get a project prioritized.
Sharing our Tessitura set up here in hopes that it's a head start for some others. You'll obviously need to adjust to fit your own data. We use WordFly, but the attached is just the Tessitura portion--hopefully it's practical info for anyone.
While we'll start with just these ticket donations, the general plan is that we can move all our small gift letters to this process and never look back.
2061.Triggered Gift Acknowledgments via WordFly.pdf
I am following up my own post with a crowdsource question--it's the one thing holding us back from setting this in motion.
Some of our records are households and some are individuals. Since this is becoming a receipt, we want to data merge in the constituent name.
However, when we do
Fname + LName
it becomes, for example,
Jamie Jamie O'Brien Household.
I can't spot where to manage Salutations within a dynamic list / output set, and nothing else is coming to mind as how to adjust (Tessitura or text). I suppose we could do something elaborate with Dynamic content within the WordFly template and have one section that displays if you're an individual and one if a household, but that's giving me a migraine. Insight anyone?
I was planning to start a conversation about this today! IncredibleAs for Salutations, we have a Query Element Group called "Constituent - Salutation" that allows me to pull in the outside/inside lines from salutations. It's not currently filterable, but I think you could add a parameter to allow you to filter by salutation type if your org has many. That gives me a much more consistent output of readable names (and are the fields we've been using on print acknowledgements anyway).
Maery--Brilliant! This is exactly the data point I expected to exist and couldn't find on my own.
Unfortunately, I don't think knowing this helps remove the obstacle though, as now I can see exactly what state our salutations data is in.... But that's a different story, isn't it? I can get to the data at least!
Thanks for sharing this! We've been in the same position of wanting to go this way and feeling like this is the perfect moment!
I would love to hear from more folks who may have these working for donations. We are looking to do this for our org and I am wondering what criteria folks typically use for the list to ensure that all gifts get acknowledged.
For example, our online gifts go on account first, then are processed as contributions at a later date. This typically is the next day or two, but could be on Monday for a late Friday gift. The contribution date in these cases is always the date they made the gift online, which may be 2-3 days earlier (or in the case of mailed checks, the date the check was written or envelope post date). Memberships are typically created for these donations as well and our current method is to have the initiation date be the beginning of the month the gift is given in.
Would the seed list criteria help to exclude folks who already received a digital ack if I open up the contribution date to a broader range?
Is is possible to incorporate the already existing contribution acknowledgement letter functionality to help with this?
Any further feedback on this topic would be great!
I don't have these running yet, but I have been thinking about creating some list criteria that look at unprinted acknowledgement letters. I'll update if I get that working!