Has anyone created or used a combined version of the print acknowledgement letters report where you can select multiple ack letter types and the file comes out with a column indicating the letter type for each row? We're finding it very cumbersome to run the report so many times each day, especially because some of them only wind up with one or two people on them.
Thanks!
Anne Mullane-Stevens
Manager, Institutional Advancement Data and Operations
Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
We did this at my last organization and it worked very well.What I chose to do here while redesigning the ack system to be less cumbersome was whittle us down to only one letter type. Since we were merging our letters in Word anyway, I built a merge template that customized the letters based on other information. This has allowed us to be more flexible about what we're customizing in each letter without having to deal with the frankly cumbersome ack rules in Tessitura.
Hi Maery,
Just out of curiosity, how many letter types are dealing with once you merge to Word? We are trying to find a way to make this process less time consuming, but with our huge number of letter types, I'm not sure this would actually create less work instead of more.
It was not a small feat to make this happen, and it probably wouldn't work for everyone.
Before the overhaul, we had something like 25 letter types? It's harder to quantify now, because each letter has so many variables in it. We have two merge documents - one for full ack/thank you letters and one for cards. Within the main letter, there are seven different letter bodies plus custom language in the opening paragraph and the receipt based on different variables like the channel of the gift (stock has a totally different receipt than IRA, DAFs don't generate the receipt portion at all, etc) and the type of transaction. It pulls in custom language for each designation and varies the signature based on the level of the donor, etc. What it's resulted in is a pretty quick process to having solid letters generated that only need further customization when they're particularly important gifts. The cards are a little less variable, but we only use them for tribute gifts so they're largely personal and pretty rare for us. The original process easily took the person managing it a full day each time, and now the bulk of the work is done in 30 minutes or so.
This seems like a great way to help eliminate the dozens of ack letter types in the system. Did you build all of this into Tess directly?
I did not. I think you probably could do a lot of this within Tessitura with a strong dev team, but it's just me here. I wanted something that our Individual Giving Associate could easily learn to maintain herself, so I built almost everything in Word and Excel. We did make some customizations to our letter format and the stored procedure to get some additional info we wanted to pull in (like total pledge balance).
ok cool. That makes sense. Do you mind sharing some of how you have constructed your word merge docs? We are trying to simplify our ack letter process currently and yours sounds like a great place to start! Feel free to email me and we can chat more if you want, srolle@kcopera.org