Year End Thank You Letters: Creating Documents 3087

Year End Thank You Letters: Creating Documents

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The New Year is finally here and it is time to recognize all of your 2016 donors. By now your 2016 gifts have all come in, been processed, and entered into eTapestry. If you have not already, you will want to create a query containing all the donations as well as a template for your letter

The New Year is finally here and it is time to recognize all of your 2016 donors. By now your 2016 gifts have all come in, been processed, and entered into eTapestry. If you have not already, you will want to create a query containing all the donations as well as a template for your letter as described in the last two blogs in this series, which I will link at the bottom in case you missed them. When creating letters you will follow the prompts and select the options that will work best for you. Here are the full steps on how to create documents.

Before you get started, there are just a few things I wanted to highlight about these steps.

For Document Options, you will want to think about how you want your letters to be grouped. Since this is an end of the year letter we don’t want to send one for each Journal Entry as this would send people a letter for each of their gifts for the year. If you have included the Entry List Widget in your template to itemize each gift, you can choose to show Split Transactions as one gift or with each segment as its own.

Some organizations will use Receipting in their database. If your organization does not, you can just click Next when you get to the Receipting step. You will see a blue message on the screen for that step, but it will tell you “This is not an error message” and that you may go on to the next step. For those who are receipting, you will need to have the Generated Receipt Number field in your template, if these gifts have already been receipted individually you can select Nothing so a new receipt number is not created.

The Delivery steps determines how you will receive these documents. If you select Drop Box, these documents will be accessed in eTapestry by clicking Home and then selecting your file under Drop Box. This can be useful if you need to reference them later or re-print. You may also mark Auto-mailing to automatically email the letters to the accounts in your query that have email addresses (on the persona selected in step 1). If you select this option you will have the opportunity to enter the Subject line of the email and whether you want the letter to be in the body of the email or an attachment. When the letters are created at the end, the auto-emailed ones will not be included (since those will be sent via email directly to donors) so this option is great if you want to save on paper! See screenshot below for auto-mailing option and Drop Box delivery.

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On the Tracking step you can select to create Contacts to track your communication with these donors. Selecting this option will add a Contact to their Journal indicating that you have sent them this letter, however it will not store a copy of the letter on their account. You can also create a query of the accounts with or without emails. If you will be creating Mailing Labels for these letters and you chose to auto-email some of them, a query of the accounts without emails would be a great idea since you won’t be needing labels for those being emailed automatically.

Make sure you preview the information at the end to look over the options you chose and the number of documents created. If something isn’t right, you can click on a step to go back to it! End of the year letters are always going to be a three step process to identify your donors, customizing your letter, and finally creating the documents. Hopefully this series helped to shed some light on this process and make wrapping up the year a little bit easier. We wish you all the best in 2017!

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