General question. Are there any orgs out there who have multiple people handing ack letters? In other words, do any of you NOT have just one staff person who handles acks. I'm particularly interested in orgs with donors exceeding 5000 donors a year.
Thanks!
I would suspect many organization depending upon size would handle acknowledgments differently.
Generally acknowledgements are handled as follows here:
Members giving 2,499 or below and gifts to Annual fund and other special asks not related to membership -- these acknowledgments are programmed in Acknowledgment function in Tessitura.
Members 2,500 thru 24,999 -- letters are manually selected by data entry folks depending upon action (new, renew, reinstate, additional gift) and membership level – letters are selected in Tessitura and a merge document done
Members 25K and over – no acknowledgement in Tessitura all done by Development staff
Letter text for the first two is done by the Program directors
From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Chandra Asken Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 12:42 PM To: McKinley, Leslie Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Ack Letters
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Hello again, Chandra! We do.
Annual individual donors of $2,499 or less are handled by one associate, individuals of $2500 and up by one, all institutional gifts (corporations, foundations and government) by one, and all trustee gifts by one. Each different type has their own Ack sets in Tessitura, and all acknowledgements are generated via Tessitura and Word templates, with some degree of manual tweaking for special and/or extraordinary gifts.
Hi Chandra,
Here at the PSO for Individual Annual fund one person handles letters for lower level donors, another for major donors and board. In Tessitura we assign the same letter to donors of all levels, but I have the ack report scheduled to run regularly, first using several lists, such as board, major donors, and then it runs without a list to catch all other acks. Each report is saved as a data source and then merged with a letter template; there is one for board, major donors, lower donors. Letters at a certain level have a signature inserted, while major donors leeters are personally signed by different people depending on the dollar amount. Coding in the merge file adds the correct name and title according to level.
If you'd like any additional info, let me know.
T.C.