Is there a faster way to email receipts in bulk?

Evan Webb

I am working through a mountain of donations, and I am finding that the most tedious, time-consuming part of my gift processing workflow is “Gift Receipting." This can only generate 300 acknowledgments at a time. But I have lists of 10,000+ gifts, and clicking and waiting for the time out error, and then clicking again to send these 300 at a time is taking me hours upon hours. Is there any way to queue up a list of 20,000 gifts for generating and sending gift receipts without all this clicking? Maybe there's some secret way I can accomplish this through the Developer Console? Appreciate any help. Thank you.

Faith Murray

@Evan Webb, for this massive amount of gifts, you may need to bypass the built-in receipting mechanism. I suggest pulling the constituents in a DB query (summary giving-total number of gifts = 1 with today's date), then transfer that into an NXT query. Use NXT's marketing function to send an email with merge fields (below). Then global change or import the gifts in DB view to mark them “acknowledged”.

If you use a DB export with an external email platform like Mailchimp, you could conceivably add additional custom-field merge info into the receipt, such as fund, card type, or comments.

JoAnn Strommen

@Evan Webb What an amazing response for your org! Wonderful yet overwhelming situation to be in to process that # of gifts.

If you are still seeing a large # of incoming donations, is it possible to ereceipt when an online donation is made? Gift confirmation reply email could have charitable contribution statement.

Catherine Burns

@Evan Webb
Hi Evan. Congratulations on your fundraising success. I recommend Mail Merge Toolkit Pro. Small annual price. Export you data, design your receipt template in Word, send receipts as PDF attachments and customise the email and subject. Best of all you can queue the emails and limit the number that are sent per hour to avoid any SPAM limitations your email provider may have. https://www.mapilab.com/outlook/mail_merge/

We use this with database view and export the data using the Mail module to mark the gifts as receipted and acknowledged. We send the emails via Outlook. We use it for cash gift receipts each week, and sent around 10,000 annual receipts with it this year too.

I'm just looking at the NXT receipting options (which have only recently been released in NZ) and the limited customisation, along with the issues you are experiencing, means we will not be moving to NXT receipting.

Megan Thiel

@Evan Webb I understand you'd like to do more, but it sounds like you've had success with receipting 300 gifts at a time through NXT? About 24 hours ago, I attempted to receipt 300 gifts at one time by ‘selecting all’ in my gift list and they are still pending within the ‘Receipt Series’ tab. Blackbaud has been unable to solve for us yet.

Do you or does anyone else have suggestions to address pending gift receipts in NXT? I'm afraid they are hung up and will not process. Thank you.