Hello!
I'm writing to see if anyone knows or has created a way to directly connect an Acknowledgement Letter to a Gift given by a Constituent?
My Director of Development is very insistent that we do this for ALL gifts ($1-$1M). We come from using Raiser's Edge software - where as a Gift was entered it allowed you to make a Word Document Letter immediately and directly tied to that Contribution/Gift.
The only option we've possibly found is to do is run an Acknowledgement letter, mail merge, separate each letter, save each letter, go to a Constituent record, create a plan where I add in their letter, go back to their Contribution and then add in the plan... Is there another/easier way?
Our company is new to Tessitura and we're slowly figure out all the bells and whistles of the software; so i greatly appreciate any advice!
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Salvatore VastaArtistic Manager, Madison Opera
Hi Salvatore,
I think that many orgs do the excel/merge sequence for acknowledgements. However when I worked at Fort Worth Symphony we had a report that did that work, and we printed straight to letterhead. The formatting/content was updated via our DBA. The report did update the gift that the acknowledgement had been printed.
You may want to connect with them.
Megan HallSeattle Symphony
You might be able to do a Constituent report like the standard envelope which drops from the tool bar – check with your IT/App Support folks
From: Salvatore Vasta [mailto:bounce-salvatorevasta8929@tessituranetwork.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2016 10:44 AM To: McKinley, Leslie <LMcKinley@nycitycenter.org> Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Acknowledgment Letters Tied to Constituents Directly?
Salvatore Vasta Artistic Manager, Madison Opera
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Salvatore,
We run the Print Acknowledgment Letters utility and save down the Excel spreadsheet to be merged into our template acknowledgments at that level; the only way I know of to actually save the verbiage of the letter in Tessitura would be to upload the acknowledgment letters one by one to the individual constituents on their records, which obviously will be a major time suck.
We do save all of our merged files on our local server so that, at any given moment, any member of our Development team can access our Windows server and see what letters were printed for which constituents for which types of gifts on a given date.
As far as I know it is possible to set up acknowledgment letter templates in Tessitura so that you can create the letters in Tess and then print, but we just found that we have so many different letter types (and so many scenarios where we need the flexibility to tweak an individual acknowledgment letter) that it makes more sense for us to do that work outside of Tess once the raw gift data is downloaded out,.
Hope this helps in some way, but I'm happy to help brainstorm other solutions too.
Thank you,
Brian