Acknowledgements in 48hours - what is your process?

Lance Henze
Lance Henze
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud Altru® General Discussions

A little background… we're a relatively small operation utilizing BB Altru. While everyone harps on the need to get thank yous/acknowledgements to donors within 48 hours, our current process for entering gifts is done only once per week. This means the deposit hits my desk on Friday, I handle all of the donation entries, and then promptly run the acknowledgement process so these letters can get out the door. This is all fine and dandy for anyone who donated on that Thur or Fri, but if the donor happens to donate that Fri evening or Sat, etc then their letter isn't even being printed for another week. It's not hard to see why this is problematic if the 48hr window is the goal.

So, how are you handling this process to get letters to donors within the standard 48 hour time frame? Is a deposit done every day? Are the donations being entered daily before the deposit is even ready? Does the employee opening the daily mail put together a summary email containing all that came in?

I'm just trying to get a handle on some of our options to determine what may work best for us in order to speed up this process.

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Comments

  • Spring Velazquez
    Spring Velazquez
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge Name Dropper

    @Lance Henze
    If you're going to continue with your once weekly deposit schedule, you can simply enter your gifts into batches each day (and use the deposit date as the GL Post date for all batches that week). Verify and commit as normal so you can process your DAL in a more timely manner.

    Also - don't drive yourself crazy trying to follow “best practices”. They're just suggestions - you can use them as guidelines to determine what's best for your org. I know organizations that don't send the DAL for anything less than $100, or only send a summary statement once a year, or who send DAL for any gift over a penny - but the commonality is that it works for their org at this moment in time.

    Best of luck!

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