E-Receipt Challenges - Has this happened to you?

Debbie Reyna · April 2020

Hello Blackbaud Community,

We've begun the process of e-receipting and have ran into some challenges. Could you comment if this happens to you and any suggestions for solutions?

*If we run the mail merge for receipts over a quantity of 50, the mail merge locks up and displays and error "This action cannot be completed because the other application is busy. Choose "switch to" to activate the busy application and correct the problem." Does this happen to you and do you only e-receipt for a certain quantity at a time?

*Any E-receipts for organizations are not going through even if the org has the email type listed in the e-receipt tab. Does this happen to you?

*The exception query is not populating anything, even when gifts do not generate a tax receipt number. How are you able to tell whether or not the email went through?

*Do you have a separate e-receipt mail merge for foreign addresses?

Thank you for any and all help and comments.

Thank you,

Debbie Reyna

Director of Gifts and Stewardship Services

University of Texas at Dallas

Keith Wilson · April 2020

Yes, it happens, but not just with e-Receipts. Generally the more complex the Word Merge doc is, the longer it takes for those letters to generate. I usually find it helpful to close as many other applications as I can, and then have learned to be very patient and let it do it's thing! Eventually the letters should populate. This isn't very helpful, but it's obviously a known issue: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/44797?_ga=2.35815904.1165958329.1586183099-1777224560.1584706095. Hope this helps!

Julia Kalinkina · April 2020

Hi Debbie

We are trying to start using it for the third time already, but it doesn't go far. It feels like we are still living in the last century with such limited functionality for emailing receipts ?

I already have a list of links for known issues - hope it helps:

How to send eReceipts: http://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/40327
EReceipts with no email address do not show in exceptions after merge: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/95963
What happens when eReceipt processes fail: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/47750
Where are hard bounce notifications sent when sending eReceipts? https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/95419
Error: No records meet specified criteria when printing receipts: https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/41640
Incorrect receipt numbers issued to donors when Raiser's Edge eReceipts fail (presumably fixed in 2018): https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/108848
Emailing receipts to Organisation’s contacts: https://www.kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/121614

Debbie Reyna · April 2020

Thank you Julia for sending this. At least I know I am not alone with the issues we are having. I truly appreciate your response!

Debbie Reyna

Kristi Gessler · June 2020

We are moving from mailing Donor Acknowledgement Letters for our in-the-door donations to emailing e-receipts. Is anyone else doing this too? What have you discovered? It seems as if this should be a lot easier in this day and age than it is! Any comments will be helpful!

- Kristi Gessler

Gift and Data Processing Specialist

Adventure Unlimited

JoAnn Strommen · June 2020

If we were considering this change, I would want to ask donors their preference. Some people I'm sure prefer hard copy for their records. Tracking and sorting that could get messy. Could be a factor especially with certain donor segments.

I know if someone wants to commit fraud with a paper receipt they will find a way and now with all the technology out there it's easy to edit PDFs too. I've always had questions on how secure e-receipts are. You may find more requests for annual statements.

Just some thoughts.

Kristi Gessler · June 2020

Thank you for this comment. Very good to think about. We are finding that most donors seem to want this, and our Foundation team would like to move in this direction as everyone is working remote right now. But you bring up very good points about security and record keeping.

Michael Mathias · June 2020

This is such an interesting comment. Our
stance has been that we that provide a receipt that indicates we
are a non-profit organization and certain charitable contributions
to non-profits are tax-deductible—but we also note that how donors
treat this information on their tax returns is their responsibility
and that they should consult with a professional before filing a
return that includes deductions for charitable contributions.
Essentially, whatever they choose to do is not our concern. Of
course, our e-receipts indicate that we are incredibly grateful for
the gift. ?

Best,

Michael J. Mathias

Director of Communication and Donor
Relations

Interim Director of Alumni and Annual
Giving

Froedtert & the Medical College of
Wisconsin

Office of Development and Alumni Relations

Mobile: 414-477-6957

Office: 414-955-4738

Victoria Gare · August 2020

Hi and thanks for these questions.

We are having very similar challenges.

Specifically - not creating an exception query and not receiving bounce back emails if an email does not contain a proper delivery domain.

It would be great to get some definitive answer on some of these issues from Blackbaud.

Leah George · August 2020

We, too, are looking to transition to e-receipts, but I am curious to know if there is any way to capture the content of the email (receipt) somewhere on the donor's record?

Thank you!

Owen Norvell · September 2020

As far as I can tell the intended functionality of E-Receipting is to send a PDF'd receipt along with a message. Any chance the PDF can be left out of the equation? We don't have a need for the PDFs and would prefer to have just the email text sent out.

I just want to confirm this before I setup a workaround for what we want to do.

JoAnn Strommen · September 2020

Owen Norvell‍ I believe the intent of a PDF is that it is more difficult to manipulate/falsify. IMO, an email is quite easy to change. Donor could potentially change receipt amount/date/details to whatever they desired.

I would love to see the e-receipt function address all the issues others have raised. It would be such a great option.

Just something to consider.

Catherine Burns · September 2020

We are also looking at transitioning to e-Receipts. Thanks everyone for your tips and advice.

In testing I seem to be able to use conditonal mail merges like we do for printed letters, these are based on the Letter Code on the gift. I already set every receipt up as an export too so they can be printed / re-printed from the gift record. Would this work for you as a way of capturing the email content Leah George‍?

Leah George · September 2020

Thanks Catherine. Do you add it in the notepad of the gift record?

Kari Frazer · December 2020

Hi Debbie and Julia, I am seeing generally unstable behaviour with e-receipts as well. Thanks for the list of kb articles.

My biggest issue right now is that the Exception Queries have stopped being created. This is a complete showstopper for emailing receipts. Also, the Completed E-receipts queries appears to contain gifts/constituents with bad email addresses as well, so it is pretty much a useless feature.

Does anyone else get the sense that Blackbaud wants us to use other parts of the platform to handle e-receipting? I can't imagine that errors like this would remain or that there would not be better kb articles explaining how to fix or workaround if Blackbaud really wanted us to use this feature.

robert badley · December 2020

Kari, I have said for ages now that e-receipting in RE just stinks!! Whenever we send e-receipts out it is like playing russian roulette. You just hope the process doesn't freeze on you and you have to go back and reverse receipted gifts and figure out what has been sent and try resending. We have wasted many days over the years and BB have done nothing to make it more stable, friendly, useful.......

I am curious to know though what other parts of the platform can be used for e-receipting? Maybe you are using NXT and that has other capabilities but we are still self hosted on RE 7.96.

Robert

Kari Frazer · December 2020

Hi Robert,

We are using RE 7.96 too. I was just wondering if people were using some other (parts of) blackbaud platform to email receipts since this feature seems broken.

I spoke today with another RE user who said that they export a batch, then use a product called PDF Machine Merge to email receipts. Gonna check that out next.

E-Receipt Challenges - Has this happened to you?

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