Hi all,
I'm looking for some help with creating a contribution acknowledgement template for auto-acknowledgements. My Dev team wants to put the fund description (failing that, designation description--I think this would be better) in the acknowledgement for the customer's records. I have searched the website for ways to get this data, but the only thing I've been able to find is how to get the fund ID. Is there anyone with the technical know-how that can point me in the right direction/get me started with calling the fund or designation description rather than the fund ID?
Thanks in advance!
Michael Dorsey
CRM Systems Manager
Spoleto Festival USA
mdorsey@spoletousa.org
Haven't worked with this data myself, but would this be something like what you're going for?
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System/Tessitura.htm#Topics/CGS%20Receipts/Example%20CGR%20Template.htm
If you look under "Contribution Listing":
@contribution.Fund.Description – The description of the fund for the contribution
Ryan Mauldin - this is an awesome resource. Thanks for linking it here! I'm bookmarking this one for sure. I was so preoccupied with looking for elements to use with Acknowledgements that I didn't even think about similar elements used in the cumulative giving receipt template.
John A. Moskal II - though I'm going with Ryan's solution, I'm upvoting your answer too. Creating a custom procedure could be a great solution to collect data for a more customized template. We may very likely need to create one in the future. Thanks for the help!
Cheers to you both. Have a great holiday!
I'm a fan of any custom solution--always the more fun route--coming from John A. Moskal II. :)
If you really want it...
In this case, my Development Data Research person (who is awesome and one of the few people at my organization who understands data the same way I do) wanted a custom utility that involved a decent amount of customization but I saw the potential upsides in a number of ways and so heartily agreed to do.
Every year at the end of the calendar year (right about now in fact), she would spend days and days compiling all the giving that each large donor (that is, donors of significance who gave more than just the odd donation here and there) gave use through the course of the calendar year for their tax records, putting them into a document, proofed them, and sent them out to the donors. Then she had to do it all over again, because while we are The Center for the Performing Arts, we also have a sister organization, The Great American Songbook Foundation, and, wouldn't you know it, but our Development department does the work for both organizations.
As all of our donations and their full details, including gifts of stock, in kind, etc... are all in Tessitura in one form or another, and, since we now had HTML templates, she asked me if there might be a way to automate that into a template or in some way simplify it for her. So I created a custom utility given a customer number, a calendar year and an organization with three running modes. The first would just essentially be a report of each individual's calendar year giving (which she has already used many times during the year for patrons who had questions).
The last two running modes were the kicker, though. Mode two is an e-mail proofing mode. It uses the custom HTML template I created to send an e-mail to the staff member who ran the utility for proofing that looks exactly like the e-mail it would send to the patron. Just to make sure everything looks like they would expect it to look. Once she reviews and confirms that it does look correct, she then runs the utility in mode three, which sends it to the patron. This then simplifies the entire process which used to take her days and days into a quick process. (And saves the postage by converting a letter to e-mail, which is what patrons are wanting more and more these days anyway.)
She wanted it simple and one donor at a time for now. Once she gets used to it and becomes confident and trusting in its output, I plan to expand it and allow her to choose a list of donors and thus schedule and send HTML templates out to full lists at a time, hopefully eventually turning what used to be a weeks-long process for her into a matter of minutes. And of course, this overall concept can be adapted to other types of donor letters as well.
Anyway, that is what drove me to my custom solution this time. I hope you enjoyed it!
John A. Moskal II
Wow--that's amazing. I can see my Dev team being very interested in something like this. We're kind of in a "learn to walk" phase with HTML templates and just looking to deploy an adequate auto-acknowledgement right now. When we are ready to run, this is probably something we'll want to do. Thanks for sharing that detail. Don't be surprised if I reach out to you about this again in the future!
Not a problem. I am pretty sure we have traded e-mails in the past. My (virtual) door is always open. In the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season!