Email Receipts

Kierstin Sykes

Hi, I know this has been a topic for years. Has anyone found a way to do this out of CRM for donations that don't go through online giving? And if not using native functionality, customization, or BBIS, does anyone have a 3rd party tool they'd recommend we check out? We spend a lot of money every year on printing and mailing, plus staff time, and we'd like to explore shifting to email receipts for all of our donations and pledge reminders. We currently have email receipts for credit card gifts made through our online giving site, but the majority of our gifts do not go through this site.

Jeff Garmon

@Kierstin Sykes ultimately, we wound up implementing the e-receipting functionality that is part of the Zuri Group's Expert Access for CRM. So a 3rd party solution. Here is a quick video of that Zuri offering.

Jodie Ralston

@Kierstin Sykes We also are using Zuri's e-Receipting process.

Erika Layfield

@Kierstin Sykes Blackbaud also has a custom e-receipt package that you can purchase. It looks similar to the Zuri product, but maybe slightly less refined. There are still certain kind of receipts that we still need to run through the old receipt process, but it does a fairly decent job. It is clunky… but it has cut the number of receipts that we mail down by a huge margin.

Joseph Styons

@Kierstin Sykes
Do you send emails out of CRM? If so, you can write a relatively simple query extension to expose a receipt URL + transaction ID, and use it in an export definition. Once it's in an export definition, you can use it as a merge field in your CRM email. So the user gets a “Click here to view your receipt” link in their email, and when they click it, it takes them to [https://your-receipt-url.com?revenueid=<guid>]. Then the burden is on “your-receipt-url” to pull the data for the “revenueid” and render the receipt. So it's a customization, but a very doable (and kind of fun) one.

Jay Trussell

@Kierstin Sykes
We initially used the custom from Blackbaud which is similar to what @Joseph Styons described. That method has the drawback of either requiring the donor to create a BBIS account to access the page that generates the receipt, or to have the page accessible to the public and hope that security through obscurity with protect donor information. Less than 10% of our donors have elected to create a BBIS account. And since we have the donor's contact information on the receipt, it was determined that it would be unacceptable under SC law to have it publicly available if you just guessed GUIDs until you got a result.

We ended up using the customization as a base for our final solution. We use the standard receipting process to create a selection of revenue IDs. We then feed that selection through a custom process that passes each revenue id to an SSRS report. The process does several things depending on some configuration settings. The first is that it saves the output as a pdf as a revenue attachment. If configured to do so, the process adds the pdf to a zip file containing all of the pdfs created in the run. Finally, if configured to do so, and if the donor has a valid email address on file, and has not elected to not receive eReceipts, it composes an email from a email template, attaches the pdf to the email and sends it to the donor's primary email address. We also created a custom BBIS part to surface the receipts for the donor if they do have a BBIS account.

The zip file is available for our gift processor to download, print, and mail. Note that the email engine in CRM does not allow for attachments. We ended up using SendGrid for this purpose.

Jay

Joseph Styons

@Jay Trussell This is a really good summary. I'd only add that re: the guid “security through obscurity”, it's not going to be possible to guess guids, but a workaround to that issue is to have the link go to a “Please verify your email that looks like “a***@b **.com”. That adds a little complexity, but not much.

Jay Trussell

@Joseph Styons
I think the concern was not so much as trying to target an individual, but a scraping attack to get what they could find. I agree with you that the likelihood of guessing even a single valid guid is astronomically low. But I think I would spend more time arguing the point than it took us to implement the current solution.

Kierstin Sykes

Thank you to everyone who has replied so far! I really appreciate it. We we explore we may reach out with further questions.