Gift membership acknowledgements

Lisa Saneda
Lisa Saneda
Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

Hi all! I am wondering how some of you are handling gift memberships in Altru. We don't print membership cards. I have finally put a query together to give me all the info on Giver/Receiver. However, I am having a time with the merge fields export.

Does anyone have a screen shot of how you set your fields up? I followed the knowledgebase instructions the best I could, but I'm not getting anything to generate.

Tagged:

Comments

  • Regina Holten
    Regina Holten
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    I am printing gift acknowledgments as ‘member cards’. It is a little awkward but since it is only for ones that I will be sending all to the giver, it isn't too bad. I'll print the member card, clear the process and then print the thank you. I guess you'd just do the thank you but utilize the member card process…does that make ‘sense’?

  • Lisa Saneda
    Lisa Saneda
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Makes sense. But when we have upwards of 200 gift memberships over the past 3 weeks and we email them, that won't do it for us. Right now I'm just using a query to create a mail merge and then we're copying each “letter” and putting it in an email to send to the giftee.

  • Ruth Droescher
    Ruth Droescher
    Third Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Did you try using an acknowledgement process for this? I would think you could edit the merge fields and include both donor and recipient information in the output, and then merge into a word template with letters for each.

  • Lisa Saneda
    Lisa Saneda
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Ruth, That's what I've been trying to do but the acknowledgement process doesn't want to accept my query or merge fields. I get ‘0’ every time I try to run it. Frustrating. I've done what support told me to do to add in the merge fields I need, but no luck. We're going to take a look at setting up an appeal for gift memberships, similar to New Member emails that go out each month. Fingers crossed.?

  • Ruth Droescher
    Ruth Droescher
    Third Anniversary Facilitator 1

    Do you have a screenshot of the query you're using for the acknowledgment? If it's returning 0 results, then it's probably the query not the merge fields that's the issue.

  • Sarah Osborne
    Sarah Osborne
    Seventh Anniversary Participant Facilitator 1

    Hi Lisa,

    While we don't use the Acknowledgement function for membership notices, I do send an additional email to the recipient through Constant Contact. Since we can't brand Altru communications like we can in CC, it just makes things look cleaner…

    I run my Gift Membership query and created custom merge fields in CC (such as Giver, Gift Message, Expiration Date, Membership Level) and then imported the contact list into CC. This allows me to send one form email to several groups.

    If you don't use Constant Contact or Mail Chimp I recommend creating the query and exporting into a Word mail merge doc. It's cleaner and easier than the Acknowledgement formatting in Altru, in my opinion!

    Good luck!

Categories