Would anyone be willing to share their process for acknowledgments in Tessitura?
I am also looking to see how other institutions handle gift processing for gifts that come from a Charitable Gift Fund. Does the gift get entered in Tessitura under the donor name or under the Charitable Gift Fund with a soft credit to the donor?Happy to discuss offline if preferred. Thank you!
Hi Megan,
We are new to Tessitura (launching in 2 weeks, eek!) and I am eager to see the responses you get about acknowledgements. We are currently using Raiser's Edge and have a pretty robust system in place but we're having to rethink it completely as we transition to Tessitura. It's been a bit overwhelming.
As for gifts from DAFs or other charitable giving organizations we do enter the gift on the record for the DAF and soft credit the donor. This is how we handle things in RE and will continue to handle things in Tessitura. It poses a bit of a problem if the gift is a pledge contribution but the Tessitura onboarding team has helped us figure out a work-around (adjust down the amount of the pledge by the amount of the soft credited installment). I hope that helps a little!
Hi Megan! So for acknowledgments we use the Print Acknowledgments utility for actually pulling them. Previously we would merge them directly into a document, but right now I'm saving them as excel spreadsheets just because our acknowledgment process has gotten a little more complicated and this allows me to more easily swap someone from one letter type to another. In the backend, I've got letter types set up for three levels of annual gifts (under $100, $100-$999.99, and $1,000+), as well as special acknowledgements for Gala and Capital gifts, all set to pull based on the campaign/amounts.
As far as gift funds, in my current organization we put the gift in under the donor name (though at my previous organization we put it under the fund name and soft credited the donor).
Happy to help if you have any other questions about either of these!
For any gift, DAF, matching, etc., we put the gift on the entity's account and credit to to donor. We have acknowledgment letter rules set for different types of crediting, so that it automatically adds the right letter to the contribution. Similar to Colleen, we use the Print Acknowledgments utility and download the excel files and merge in word documents. Happy to answer any questions you have!
Anna Cramer
(she/her/hers)
Development Manager
Des Moines Performing Arts
515-246-2352
annac@DMPA.org