Digital Acknowledgement Letters

Carrie Aranda:

For gifts made online - We are using the new NXT donation forms which allow for super customized confirmation emails.  We adapted those to include all of our tax information and put in a line stating this email is your tax receipt.  This way, any online gift is already acknowledged.  Since these drop into their own batch in NXT, we mark them acknowledged as of the date of the gift before committing the batch.  This keeps them out of our daily letter runs.


For the checks that we are receiving by mail, we are using an electronic signature.  I brought home acknowledgement letterhead and print all of the letters once they are ready.  Instead of running them through our postage meter (which would require a trip to the office), we bought live stamps.  I print the letters at home, fold and then stamp them.  Everyday I make a run to the post office down the street to drop them in mail by 5pm.   My org has promised to reimburse any extra expenses (i.e. printer ink, etc) that printing the letters has caused.  Our volume is typically manageable but if there are a lot of letters, I have a work crew of teenagers and a husband who can fold and stamp letters for me.


We have been tinkering with using the NXT workflow designer and email feature to email acknowledgements, but haven't quite figured it all out yet.  Part of the problem is that you can only email to a constituent list and the gift filters in a constituent list aren't robust enough.  I wish I could filter by batch and letter type in an NXT list and then add that list to a workflow which would send the acknowledgement letter.  The other hang up with NXT emails is that if the acknowledgement is related to an event, there is no way to use the receipt amount on the email.  Those we are having to either mail or email manually.  I am also trying to see if I can use Export to mail merge to Outlook and send a batch of acknowledgement emails that way.


It is definitely taking more my time to do acknowledgement letters, especially since our receptionist usually folds, stamps and mails letters.  Would love for this to be a little more automated for email.

Lauren Fardella:

For online donations, they automatically get an acknowledgement, with all of our tax information.    It is the mailed in donations that we are mailing letters out from the office 2x a week, with an electronic signature.   We are still allowed in the office, but only 1 person per department at a time.       I would like to be able to e-mail all acknowledgements, but we rarely get e-mails with mailed in checks/credit cards.


I am assuming you all don't receive emails for everyone either....we are "lucky' that we can at have one person come in 2x a week to do letters (one of those people being me)