Does anyone send letters to donors confirming their contributions for the year? Our FY ends tomorrow and last year we had a lot of issues with our donor recognition listings because our data was messy. We want to avoid that this year by sending a summary letter to donors showing all the gifts they made between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017 so they can point out any inaccuracies (we're hoping there are none since we've cleaned up data!). Is there an easy way to run a report that will show me all of the gifts from a specific donor, that I can then merge into a Word document? I've seen examples of letters like this other organizations have sent but I'm not sure the most efficient way so that I don't have to go individually into each donors record to find giving info. I'm thinking we'll only do it for people who gave over a certain amount (ie. $1,000 cumulative). Would appreciate any thoughts anyone has!
Good afternoon Christine,
At Tulsa Ballet, we put together year-end letters (by the calendar year, not fiscal year) for anyone who had donated over $500 to our organization.
The report is a custom SSRS report which is formatted to include a digital signature from our Managing Director and to fit our letterhead so that it can be saved to Microsoft Word, spot-checked for any glaring errors, and then printed for mailing.
It isn't a perfect situation because donors with a large number of gifts need extra "massaging" in order to be properly formatted in the output end of things.
I can share the report code if you're interested, but you'll probably want someone on your staff to look at the actual SSRS make-up of the report to make sure that it fits whatever letterhead you might use for printing/can be modified for whatever specific needs you might have.
Thank you,
Brian
Brian:
I would like to share your report code (and a sample report) with our DBA, at the Joffrey, Aaron Glynn. I have been struggling with this for 3 years and a new report is coming up on our agenda!