Year End Receipting || Designing Your Template

In our last post, we talked about how to query for your year end receipts. Now, we want to talk about sending these year end receipts to your donors.

You need to create a template in the Communications section.  The template is going to contain your message to your donors.  We have some standard templates already in eTapestry that you can use as a starting point.  Then just customize them to suit your needs.  Here are the names of some of those layouts:

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• Simple Business Letter – Great for thanking someone for a single donation
  
• Letter W/ Gift List – This template contains the Entry List Widget which can list out multiple transactions for that individual/household in the letter.  Great to say thank you to someone with multiple transactions where you want to list each donation out
  
• Receipt W/ Stub (Bottom) – This template is nice if you want to let the donor rip off a receipt stub to send to their tax person without sending the whole letter.  Usually used for just an overall summary and not listing every transaction.
  

We have help documentation on how to create templates here, but I’ve also provided some steps to get you started

1. 
   
2. Click Communications
   
3. Click a category to build your template in
   
4. Click New Email Or Document Template
   
5. Name the template Year End Mailing Template
   
6. Fill in a Subject line if you ever plan to email the letters to constituents
   
7. Click Next to go to step 2: Layout
   
8. Click Documents at the top of the page
   
9. Click the Letter W/ Gift List layout (or one of the other predefined templates if you like)
   
10. Edit the template
    
11. Click Step 4: Save And
    

Step 9 just says Edit the template which I know is a little vague.  Every organization says thank you in their own way.  They include their own images, links to their own sites, etc.  So this is really your time to be creative design the template that will suit your organization.  If you need help with inserting images, links, etc., you’ll want to check out our HTML Editor help document.

If you are a Canadian organization, or anyone that uses our eReceipt module to create a receipt number for your transactions, you may want to generate an actual receipt number for your 2014 transactions.  To generate a receipt number, you have to insert the Generated Receipt Number merge tag, which is in the Journal Fields category.  If you went with the Letter W/ Gift List layout mentioned in step 6, or you inserted an Entry List widget into your own template, you can insert this merge tag within the Entry List widget to be displayed.  Here is a help document for Editing The Entry List Widget.

If you decided not to use the Entry List widget to list out all of the donor/household’s transactions, then you could just type text like this:
Receipt Number:

Then you can insert the Generated Receipt Number merge tag after the semicolon.  How to insert merge tags can be found in our HTML Editor help doc.  This is good if you would want all of the transactions to share the same receipt number or if you just wanted to create a receipt for one particular transaction.

If you do not include the Generated Receipt Number merge tag somewhere within your template, then you will not be able to generate receipts when you get to the Create Document process.

Next Up: Creating Documents

Additional Resources:

Video:  Building The Template