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Year End Giving Statements

Shelley Bell

Happy Friday ALL! It's not too soon to be thinking about year end giving statements - is it…??? :-)
We currently use Crystal Reports for our year end giving statements. I found our process to be quite cumbersome this past year. (Especially when having to send them one at a time.) And I am curious how others are issuing their statements. From outside vendors to small shop processors, I would welcome any and all options.

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Comments

Miki Martin

Hello, Shelley! Currently my organization does not utilize anything to produce giving statements. However, I know this can be done through Fundraising - Giving Statements in web view. Blackbaud has some documentation on Giving Statements that you may find helpful. I know you can either email them or print PDFs to mail through this option.

Database view also has an annual report option. The Knowledgebase has a video to help with that. Hopefully this helps at least a little! Happy hunting.

Dan Snyder

@Miki Martin has shared good options, I will just chime in to say that we don't really send a full statement with each gift, but rather a nice letter with a merged line towards the bottom saying their total giving to the org for the calendar year. Other than people misplacing the letter or email, we have not had any negative feedback about these statements.

Karen Diener

Every organization I've worked with on these needs to tweak the occasional letter after it is generated. For that reason, we've always opted for an Export and merge into Word. They've adjusted the exported spreadsheet as needed, and made edits to the final merged document for some people.

While the year-end statements in webview are nice, the end result is PDF and they are not very customizable. I feel like if you are going to do this as a personalized stewardship piece, you need to be able to review and edit letters.

Karen

Nicole Holt

We have the same process as @Karen Diener: At year end, we export to a CSV and then merge into a letter. It isn't the most efficient process but it does give more opportunity for stewardship.

Shelley Bell

Karen - thanks for your response. After you have the PDFs, how do you send them? Email or Mail

Karen Diener

I haven't used the annual statement functionality in webview, so I cannot say with 100% certainty. I think they can only be emailed.

Karen

Angela Tuttle

This past January we used Blackbaud's Giving Statements however it included things that we wouldn't have included like committed gifts. There was no way to take those items out before running the letters so they had to be tweaked by hand. The letters were easy to run and can be emailed or a PDF created. However once produced the PDFs can no longer be edited. Blackbaud has placed password protection on the letters they can not be copied, saved as etc for editing. Before last year we were using a Crystal Report.

Warren Sherliker

Not sure this will solve it for you but You can Edit PDFs - there are various tools out there including PDFElement and a load of others. You can even load PDFs in the latest version of Word and edit them there although it is not as perfect at allowing edits.

Emily Savino

@Shelley - we utilize the Financial Report - Annual Statement Report out of database view. We've used it the past two years and have been very happy with the results. We include a cover letter with our mailing, which we do via mail merge. So it is a bit of extra work to match up letters with statements, but I've figured out how to print them in the same order, so that works nicely. My only warning is to make sure that gift entry is neat and tidy and that your “gift amount” and “receipt amount” data is accurate. Because that's what shows up on the annual statement reports. Best of luck, never too early to make a plan!

Karen Stuhlfeier

We use the annual statement report in database view. You can choose exactly what you want to include in it unlike the one in the web view. If you export it using the format of Rich Text Format and the destination of Disk File you can even edit it a bit if you need to.

Reuben Schmitz

@Shelley Bell we are also using the database view annual report feature and then hav ethe reports printed and mailed by an outside company. I would like to see us use the webview version, but need a bit m ore capability built in first.

Shelley Crichton

@Reuben Schmitz
I agree that using the Web Version of the report is nicer; however, I have not found a way to add a spouse who was soft credited on the giving statement. We recently had a situation where both husband and wife wanted to submit the statement to their employers for matching, but I could not force the husband's name on the statement.

Shelley Bell

@Karen Stuhlfeier - Hi Karen. We also offer an email option as well. So after running the Annual Statement Report, do you do an email merge or just send them one-off?