Using WordFly or Mail2 (or Outlook?) for Contribution Acknowledgments?

Hi Nicholas, 

We've been using Wordfly for electronic acknowledgements of web gifts under $25. It was very simple to setup once we updated our Acknowledgement report in Tess to provide an output set compatible with Wordfly.

We created a nice template for the e-ack, complete with a special thank you video. This has actually turned out not to be the best idea as some patrons are telling us the email is so visually compelling. they are missing receipt. We'll be rearranging our layout to be a bit more drab, so I recommend that you keep your template somewhat simple when setting up. 

Hope that's helpful. 

Rob

Thank you Martha and Rob, that is awesome.

Can I ask if your email templates use fields for contribution features like assigned memberships, or tax receipt functionality like receipt counters?

Nicholas,

The only fields we use are name, contribution amount, and contribution date.  However, I just built an output set with those criteria, and I don't see why it wouldn't work to add additional contribution features to an output set.

Martha

Very helpful, thank you Martha.

Can I also ask here, when you are building your Dynamic Lists, do you use the Acknowledgment Letter criteria, or do you avoid that and use the details of the Contribution/Fund/Campaign as criteria for the List?

Also, one detail that I have not been able to solve is showing a Tax Receipt number in an email, as there is not a standard Output Set Element. 

Has anyone set up a custom Output Set Element to show a Tax Receipt Number from a Contribution Acknowledgment?

I just use the contribution details for criteria.  My list pulls all contributions that came in the previous day, are under $250, and came in through the website. 

Nicholas -

At Seattle Opera, we merge some content into Wordfly from a customized acknowledgement report. There is some cleanup that is required on the backend after it is exported, but the handholding it requires is minimal. (It's close to "set it and forget it" good.)

Here are the fields that we use from our ack report:
Contribution Amount
Goods and Services Amount
Membership Level Description
Formal Saluation
Constituent ID
Email Address

It's uber simple compared to our hardcopy acknowledgements because of Wordfly's inability to do complicated mail merge. However, in the near future, we will be exploring using membership levels and campaigns to trigger alternate versions of email content using dyanamic fields (something that we already do extensively for event invitations).

Please let me know if you have further questions.

Cheers,
Tamiko

Our customized acknowledgement report is the good ol' Print Acknowledgement Report with lots of additional parameters and output sets.

Our customized acknowledgement report is the good ol' Print Acknowledgement Report with lots of additional parameters and output sets.

Thanks for sharing your processes Tamiko, sounds very cool :)

For household memberships, do you have email addresses on the household? Or does your nifty custom report pull the email for WordFly from the individuals within the household?

We aren't using Wordfly for acknowledgements (yet!) - but we implemented a nifty pre/post-show triggered email this year that does a complicated mix of grabbing emails attached to orders, and if they don't exist, it grabs all the primary emails on/affiliated to the purchasing account. (I'll have our system documented in the 2013 TLCC Mini-Magic...hopefully...!)

Essentially a local procedure runs each night to fill a local table with the necessary fields for Wordfly, then an output set feeds that info to Wordfly. Our procedure does the heavy lifting of determining the email addresses - and for some, there are two addresses that get the "same" email (if both spouses have primary emails). Like Nicholas, we tend to keep emails on the individual, and data on the household.

Happy to pass on more details if you like...

Beth

Wow Beth, you said the three magic words: Primary Email (on) Affiliated!

I would love to see some more details if you are happy to share, much appreciated.

I have hit a stumbling block when trying to display the creditor/creditee (for gift memberships) in my output set. The value I need is present in the file saved from the 'Print Acknowledgments' utility under the 'd_esal1_desc' column, but is not present in the 'T_ACK_EXT' table.

Has anyone else encountered this particular challenge?

Fetching this value would allow the WordFly emails to have messages like:

• Dear River Tam, thank you for purchasing a gift membership for Malcolm Reynolds!

and

• Dear Malcolm Reynolds, River Tam has purchased a gift membership for you.

where Malcolm Reynolds is the creditee and River Tam is the creditor.