Does anyone have a streamlined acknowledgement process they are happy with and would share? We are currently stuck in the cycle of many letters that contain a ton of customization. I am looking to create a more streamlined process that gets the initial tax letter out the door a whole lot faster. My VP is totally on board (this is one of her operational thorns) but I know I am going to get push back from my front line fundraisers. Any tips or tricks to navigate this? Thinking a system of secondary follow up based on gift amount that could be easily customized, like a phone call or note card, that comes after the tax letter (receipt?) is out the door. I would love any feedback or advice you can offer.
Hello Dana,
Recently, I did a similar overhaul of our acknowledgement process. We have three or four templates for various kinds of donations, and for each of these we have gift, pledge, and pledge payment language. Additionally, we use different language and include or exclude language based on the donation level. These acknowledgments also include receipts that frequently need to reflect specific situations.
While no process will ever encapsulate everything, I was able to boil down the most common situations, and create one letter template that captures most of the specific issues we come across. It’s a Word document that consists of about three pages of merge fields that pull text from about six other templates I’ve set up. This was a lot of work on my end, but I can now save the printed acknowledgments from Tessitura as an excel sheet, and produce 30 something letters from three or four different funds and payment types in about five minutes. We have been able to reduce our turn around time to 48 hours at the latest, and on some days have been able to send out letters the day we received the donation.
I would be happy to send over that template to you to check out, of course it would need to be formatted to your fund types, and I’d be more than happy to walk you through it. This has saved me a lot of time and trouble, and I didn’t need to ask Tessitura or our in-house power user for any additional reports or letter templates to be built in Tessitura.
Let me know if you’re interested!
Hi William!
This is something I would love to see if you wouldn't mind sharing! We are in the process of looking at our acknowledgement process and would appreciate your help. Please email me directly at chollatz@thesmithcenter.com
Thank you!!