EOY Donor Contribution Letters (Tax Letters)

F Shane Johnson

Hello from Louisiana:

In preparation for the New Year, will you share your steps to produce end-of-year donor contribution data exports to be able to produce “tax letters”?

We are moving away from the RE canned report Annual Statement Report: Reports > Financial Reports > Annual Statement Report

RE support helped me to create a constituent gift query - gifts dated 01-01-2022 thru 12-31-2022; which I “include” in a built out RE export.

I'm looking to create a clean export (of gifts > or = to $250.00), which I can merge into a letter template:

• Name
• Salutation
• Address
• City, State, Zip
• Gift date(s)
• Gift amount(s)
• Campaign and/or fund

Any suggestion are appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

Shane

Dariel Dixon

I think you're on the right track @F Shane Johnson. Obviously, every organization differs in their configuration of Campaigns, Appeals, and Funds, so no one will know what fields like you will.

Some organizations like to just use a simple summary, where others like to give detailed giving lists to their donors. That's an organizational decision, much like if you send these letters at all. (They aren't as necessary as people think…but that's another discussion). I think the hardest part is just crafting the letter. At every organization I've been a part of, this seems to be a major chore. It's an understandably important letter, but it seems to go through a neverending revision cycle. As well, you'll need to play with formats and mergefields in your word processing software, but that's a little bit of trial and error.

Let us know how it comes out for you.

F Shane Johnson

@Dariel Dixon Thanks, Dariel!

Karen Diener

@F Shane Johnson:

Hello from Louisiana:

In preparation for the New Year, will you share your steps to produce end-of-year donor contribution data exports to be able to produce “tax letters”?

We are moving away from the RE canned report Annual Statement Report: Reports > Financial Reports > Annual Statement Report

RE support helped me to create a constituent gift query - gifts dated 01-01-2022 thru 12-31-2022; which I “include” in a built out RE export.

I'm looking to create a clean export (of gifts > or = to $250.00), which I can merge into a letter template:

• Name
• Salutation
• Address
• City, State, Zip
• Gift date(s)
• Gift amount(s)
• Campaign and/or fund

Any suggestion are appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

Shane

As always, Dariel has provided sage advice. I do have some feedback specific to your query and export:

Are you send this only to people who gave at least one gift of $250 or more, or a total during 2022 of $250 or more? If it is the latter, your query criteria should change to pull from Summary Information instead of individual gift information.

I ALWAYS include Constituent ID on my exports. It can sometimes help to identify duplicate records if the name and/or address match. If the ID is different, it is a clue that you might have a duplicate record.

It can help to include Last name, or Sort Key as an output field as well. Most of the time, someone wants to sort the spreadsheet alphabetically.

I don't see Campaign included in your gift output fields, but it sounds like you'll want to do that.

You will still need to set some additional criteria your Gift Summary and individual Gift fields. You may have done this already and it doesn't show, but to check, right-click on the Gifts field and select “Criteria”. This is where you can indicate that you only want to output the gifts from calendar year 2022, include soft credits or not, and specify that you only want gifts from the “annual” campaign category.

There may be more, but those are things I can easily share from screen shots and without having a full discussion. Good for you for preparing now!!

Karen

Faith Murray

@F Shane Johnson, how interesting! We actually used to use a gift export/Word merge every year and just recently switched to the canned report instead. So much less work!

The main reason we never used the canned report before was because we could not edit gift details (for example, receipt amount, removing entries, etc). However, we realized that editing the pdf's was simple matter of upgrading our Adobe access. The canned report, of course, can't be well brand-customized, but if it accompanies a separate letter, that's not a big deal.

If you really prefer the Word merge, I suggest you include a “Receipt Amount” column. As far as the merge, since you are outputting specific gifts (not just a summary total), you will probably want to create text boxes in your Word doc to keep the fields aligned depending on how many gifts each donor has listed. Below is an example of our merge that we used to print on letterhead.