Using Acknowledgee for DAF revenue

Amanda Cose

Hello,

We had been attempting to fill in the "acknowledgee" field in a revenue batch with the name of the individual donor who recommended the donor-advised fund gift to our organization. I thought this would then result in that individual pulling into our acknowledgment merge, but it appears the assign letters process overrides anything done in batch entry. Has anyone found a workaround? Our current workaround is using if/then rules in Word, so if the appeal code = DAF, the recognition credit recipient (the individual donor) addressee pulls into the merged letter instead of the DAF (e.g., Dear Fidelity). Just curious!

Thanks,

Amanda

Stacy Evans

So, what I do is in the Batch Entry I put a note in the notes field to acknowledge the individual donor. Then, after I merge the records to the letter I will remember to change that individual letter.

Megan MonaghanHughes

Hi Amanda. The solution to this is a bit of work but well worth the investment in my opinion because of the flexibility it will give you. You'll need to update the export definition that the acknowledgement template uses and also the acknowledgement template.


By default, the export definition that the acknowledgement template uses pulls from the Acknowledged Revenue node so technically the system is working correctly in how it generated your letters because it's not even looking at the acknowledgee field at all. In order for the acknowledgee's info to populate in the generated letter, first the export definition needs to be updated to include your choice of fields that are nested under the Acknowledgee node (name/address/salutation, etc). I recommend just adding fields to start with and not deleting any unless you want to rebuild all your templates - up to you. Then after you generate a new revenue header file, set the acknowledgement template to use that header file and drop in the new acknowledgee fields and you're set. Rinse and repeat for any additional templates as necessary.


When the acknowledgee field is left blank, the system will default to using the donor's info from the Acknowledged Revenue node without you having to tell it to.


I've attached a screenshot of the nodes I'm referring to:
Ack Exp Def.jpg