Receipting 101

All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the honor of getting to be your guys trainer today for our Receipting 101 webinar. This webinar is going to primarily be focused on introducing you to the basics of building both letter and email receipt templates Read More

All right, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the honor of getting to be your guys trainer today for our Receipting 101 webinar. This webinar is going to primarily be focused on introducing you to the basics of building both letter and email receipt templates in DonorPerfect and walking you through the process of how to generate your receipt. One thing to keep a note that for this particular session, we are only focusing in on receipting. For those of you located in the United States, if you are one of our Canadian clients who are wanting to learn about how to do charitable receiving for Canada, you will want to check out the On Demand webinar receiving for Canada, which can be found on our website, donorperfect.com.
So in terms of why we have a whole webinar dedicated to just generating tax receipts. Well, ultimately, it comes back to a thing that most nonprofits are striving to achieve donor retention. According to the Burke donor survey, 45% of donors say it was an outstanding thank you letter that inspired them to give again. So with this thought or this why in mind, we know that if we thank our donors and if we thank them in a timely manner, ideally, within 48 hours of receiving the gift, we can increase the likelihood that that donor is going to make a second contribution, and we know that it’s much easier and much more cost effective to retain our existing donors than it is to obtain or acquire new ones. So thanking our donors is a cost effective way to start our donor stewardship efforts and continue to grow our retention. So in terms of what we’re going to be focusing on in today’s session, we’re going to start off with the end result, so showing you what you’re going to end up with, and then working our way backwards to show you how you can build out your custom templates and how to actually generate your receipt. So we’re going to be walking through how to build your letter and email template, how to generate receipts in a batch or a large group, and how you can receipt donors, one off from within the gift screen. And as always, the contents of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. So starting off with the end result, when you guys are doing your data entry and you’re going into DonorPerfect, you’re going in and putting in quite a few details about your donor, the date of the gift, the amount of the gift, you are hopefully capturing the fund designation or the general ledger where they allocated their gift to as part of the data entry. We hope that you are also capturing the Key field thank you letter. So how are you thanking this donor? If it’s a gift to the golf tournament, do they get a golf tournament specific Thank you, or are they just getting your generic everyday thank you that you use for everyone. The great thing about DonorPerfect in our receiving process is the more information that you capture about the donation, the more personalized receipt templates you can create. So we were able to take all of the details about that donor’s gift and merge it into a golf specific thank you letter that is addressed to Jane Nicholson at her address, and recognizes that we received a $50 gift from her on September 10, and that that donation was going to our building fund efforts, so minimal effort to create a really personalized letter experience for your donor. And the same thing can also be done oop. Let’s see here.
The same thing can also be done with email as well. I know my own experience, I’m finding more and more of my clients are switching over to primarily email receipts and thank yous because it’s a cost effective way to thank your donors, and it’s instantaneous. We can get that receipt right out the door within that 48 hour time frame, and we can do the same thing, where we can take details from the gift. Like the Gift Amount, like the date of gift, like the designation of the donation, and we can incorporate that into our email, and we can create specific thank yous for the different way our donors give. So we always want to have at least a standard thank you that we can use to acknowledge any donation, and that’s where I would have every one of you start, is having a standard Thank you, and then we can grow and start creating thank yous that are specific to why people give. So we can have a thank you that’s specific for people who support our golf tournament, a thank you letter that’s specific when someone makes a donation in memory or in honor of a person a thank you letter, that might be specific, when someone makes a major gift, or when someone gives to Giving Tuesday or supports a specific campaign. Now I’m not saying you necessarily need all of those examples, but what I would recommend is sitting down and thinking about how your donors support your organization and through what channels, and pick maybe two or three specific Thank you templates that you think you could use to thank your donors and make sure if they give more than once a year, they’re not getting The same exact thank you every time they donate. You so once you sit there and you’ve came up with your list, and you say, I want to have a standard Thank you. I want to have a golf tournament. Thank you. I want to have a thank you I can use for people who make donations in memory or in honor of a person. And I want to create a thank you that’s specific for people who sign up and support, let’s say my building campaign. But once you have your list and your idea in mind, now we can start building out the coding and the templates in the system that we’re actually going to use to acknowledge the donor. So there are three key pieces that we have to set up in DonorPerfect to make receding work. The first is creating thank you letter codes. So when you do your data entry work, when you are manually entering donations into DonorPerfect as part of that gift entry process, you assign a thank you letter code. This identifies the specific message that the donor will receive when they get their receipt. So this is how we identify does the donor get our standard Thank you versus our tribute thank you or our campaign specific Thank you. So the thank you letter code is just a data entry value that our receiving database or our receiving tools use to know which receipt the donor should receive. The thank you letter code doesn’t actually dictate, though, what the letter or what the email is going to say. So once you build the thank you letter code, then you have to build your mail merge template. Your mail merge template is your letter receipt template. This is what the donor is going to receive in the mail and what that letter is going to say, mail merch templates are just Word documents that we upload and store in DonorPerfect for the purpose of receiving. And yes, we do have sample templates available that you can use to help get yourself started, and you can take any field from the gift screen and add that as a merge field in your letter template, so that you can create those personalized messages for each donor. For each donor’s letter will uniquely show the amount that they gave the general ledger, their donation was designated to the date of the gift, whatever details that you deem are important that you want to incorporate into the letter and email templates work very much in the Same way, only these are sent, obviously, through email, unlike letter templates, the email templates are not Word documents that we upload, and we actually build the email templates within DonorPerfect itself. And if you’re a brand new user of DonorPerfect, you will have some sample templates that you can use as a jumping off point, just like the letters, you have the ability to insert merge fields into your email so you can create a more personalized thank you experience for your donors. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to break down each one of these. Says step by step by step, and walk you through, how do we build the code, the letter and the email template? Now for the purposes of today’s webinar, I’m going to be creating a tribute, thank you letter. So I’m creating a tribute, thank you letter, so that when I get donations that are in memory or in honor of a person, I can use this receipt as a way to acknowledge that the donor made a gift in memory or in honor of a person. So it goes back to recognizing why that donor chose to make that donation, and also speaking to the impact that their donation has so I want to create a tribute thank you letter the very first thing that I’m going to do is go into DonorPerfect and create my thank you letter code. The thank you letter code is how we assign what message the donor will receive when we do our receipt process. And there are two ways that you can add codes in DonorPerfect. You can either click on the plus sign next to the thank you letter field on the gift screen, or you can go to the settings gear icon in the top right corner of DonorPerfect and add the code under code maintenance. Oh, my God. A little bit ahead of myself there. So I’m going to navigate away from the PowerPoint and show you guys how to add a thank you letter code to your DonorPerfect system.
Alrighty. I am logged in the DonorPerfect. I want to add a thank you letter code. And as a reminder, you can go to the settings gear icon and choose code maintenance the second option from the top. This is one way you can add the code. The second way that you can add the code is you can use Quick Search to open up any donor record in the system.
Add click the Add a new gift button in the white ribbon to create a quote, unquote fake gift. And in the Thank you, slash receipt template, drop down. This is where you will create your code. So you can see, these are all of the unique messages that I use to thank my donors. Now I have a tribute. Thank You letter code there, because this is a common example. So I am going to do a bit of bad data entry here I admit where I’m going to create another code called tribute. Thank you. Parentheses webinar, just so I can show you guys how to create the code. So I’m going to click on the plus sign to create a new code. And for my code description, I’m going to call this tribute. Thank You letter for the code name. I’m going to call it tribute, underscore, t, y, l, so the code description is what you guys see when you do your data entry, the code name is what you guys will see when you actually generate the charitable receipt. And let me put the colon webinar.
So the purpose of creating this thank you letter code is so that if I’m entering donations manually, if I’m entering donations using the Batch Entry tool, if I’m importing donations that I want to receipt at a later date, the thank you letter code allows me to tell DonorPerfect What message I am going to use to thank the donor when I’m ready to do my charitable receipt so.
So, I’m going to do a tribute. Thank you for $560 that’s going to go to my building fund. I’m just going to go through and fill out a couple details about my donation real quick.
And I’m going to click apply to a tribute so that I can actually look up an existing tribute. So this is going to be a tribute donation in memory of amber Fitzgerald. I’m. Okay, now I’m going to have you guys right into the chat here for me. If you were creating an In Memoriam or an in honor of tribute letter, do you think it would be important to include the name of the person the donor was honoring or memorializing. So yes or no in the chat, if you are going to do a in memory or an in honor of letter, do you think it would be important to include the name of the person they were memorializing? I got definitely yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Everyone’s like, absolutely perfect. So now that we have our thank you letter code, which is just our way to know which of our different letters or emails we will send to the donor, now I need to actually craft and build the letter template and the email template that can be used during the receiving process. So I’m going to start with the letters. The reason I’m going to start with the letters is that they, arguably, or at least in my experience, take the most time to build because they involve a bit more copying and pasting. All right. Now, before I go ahead and start building the letters, I’m going to have you guys write into the chat again, yes or no. How many people here currently have, at minimum, a standard thank you letter that they send to their donors when they get a donation. So you have some type of text that says, Thank you for your donation. Your gift does x, y, z, perfect. Perfect. I’m happy to see everyone, at least, has come in with something that they can at least hopefully start applying to your own letters and emails. And in my sample nonprofit, we also have the same thing. We have a couple letter templates that we have built. So now it just becomes, well, how do I get my message into a template that works with DonorPerfect receipt data? So if you are a brand new user of DonorPerfect, the great news is, if you go into the settings, gear icon and mail merge templates, you can download our sample letter templates using the gray arrow next to the document called Letter thank you that will give you a list of potential merge fields that you can copy and paste into Your existing letter. Now, if you are an older DonorPerfect client, you can also go into our mail merge template library, and you can download the sample templates from the library that exists in the knowledge base. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you guys my letter that I have crafted that does not have any DonorPerfect merge fields in it yet. And then I’m going to show you how you can go into the mail merge template library and use the samples to actually create your letter. So just to show you guys what I have maybe let’s take a looky here.
I Perfect. So this is my sample letter. This is what I’m coming to DonorPerfect with. And we can see that I have all of these red texts that indicate data points that I would want to include in my letter, like the donor’s name, the gift amount, the type of tribute and tribute name. So I want to replace all of these red blocks of text with a DonorPerfect merge field. So when I go to generate my letters, this data will take the data from the donor profile and from the gift record and merge it in. So to access those templates in DonorPerfect, you go to the settings gear icon, and you go to mail merge templates. And if you are a brand new DonorPerfect user, what you’re going to see, and I apologize, I’m just double checking my screen sharing perfect. And she should have a folder called system templates where you can download the letter general document. This will have some sample merge fields for you to copy. Copy and paste into your own document. If you’re an older nonprofit client or user of DonorPerfect, you can come down to the bottom right corner looking for pre made templates, and you can go into the knowledge base article to find that exact letter general document.
Apologize, I’m a little itchy today, so in the mail merge template library, you can come in and find your general thank you letter template you and we can download this and save it on your desktop.
Oh, let’s see here.
Apologies. I don’t know if anyone else ever gets lost when they download things from websites, you know, like, wait, where did it all go? 
Uh, perfect.
Alrighty, so I have my letter on the left, the DonorPerfect template on the right, all I’m going to do is look in the DonorPerfect template and find the corresponding merge fields and Copy them from this document and paste them into my ladder. So I copy the address block. I copy salutation. That’s how I want to greet the donor after dira, hello.
I look through the list additional merge fields. I find my field prompt I’m going to copy the data that’s in the merge field section, amount and gift date are actually in the letter. So I’m going to copy the amount merge field into gift amount, and I’m going to copy the gift date merge field. So it’s just copying and pasting. Alrighty, I can take tribute name and tribute type description and copy these as well. Tribute type description will pull in the data point. Is it an In Memoriam or in honor of letter? Tribute name will pull in the name of the person that you are honoring. 
And then at the bottom, I have this little receipt section that I created. So again, I’m just going to look in my sample that I downloaded from DonorPerfect and just copy the merge fields over.
Alrighty. So while I’m copying these merge fields in the chat, does anybody have any questions about what I’m doing here in terms of copying and pasting the data from the DonorPerfect template into my letter.
And if you want to include on your receipt the fund designation, that’s generally the general ledger field. If you want to copy the check number, that would be the reference field typically.
Why doesn’t the sample merge already have the merge fields included? So this is the sample template. The sample template does have the merge fields already included. What I’m doing is I’m copying from the sample into my letter that I had created. So if you already have a Word document that has your logo, your formatting, your message. A what you can do is take the DonorPerfect sample, merge fields and copy them into your letter. So where you would have the Gift Amount field in your letter, you would copy the merge field for gift amount. Does that make sense? 
All right, so once I have this good and squared away, I’m going to save this on my desktop.
And then I’m going to upload this letter into DonorPerfect. So I like to think about DonorPerfect When it comes to letter receipts kind of being like a Google Drive where you are essentially using under the settings gear icon and mail merge templates. You’re using DonorPerfect to essentially host your files. I’m going to click Upload new in the bottom of the screen to create a new letter Browse My Computer to find the document.
I give the document a name, and I’m going to save this as a gift pledge template type. The template type has to be gift pledge so that it can be used as part of the receipt process. And then I click upload, and that will upload my letter into DonorPerfect, so I can now use it as part of my receipt process. So letter templates just involve inserting merge fields into your already existing Word documents and then uploading them to DonorPerfect.
So now for email receipts, email receipts are actually built within side of DonorPerfect.
So for email templates, we build these within DonorPerfect, and if we want to include merge fields, it’s a little bit easier with email templates, because we just have to click the button Insert Merge Field. And this will allow you to look across any field in the main bio or gift pledge tables and insert them into your email.
And then once you save the template, you can start using it as part of your proceeding process. So in terms of the merge fields that are used the email receipt template, merge fields are different than the merge fields that you use when you’re merging a Word document. So we can’t just copy and paste the merge fields from the Word document into the email template and have it work, but I can show you at least a little trick in terms of speeding up the process for creating these templates. So let me go ahead and navigate back into DonorPerfect and to create my email templates, I’m going to go to mailings and email templates. So mailings and email templates is where we’re going to go to actually create the email and if you have an existing template, you can edit your existing template, or you can say, add a new template and build something completely from scratch, which is what I’m going to do.
So the first thing you do is you give your template a name, and I would always recommend naming it so that it matches the thank you letter code that you select during data entry under Thank you code Association, this is where we link the email. Email to your thank you. Letter code, email templates are the only template where we have to link the message to the code. We do not have to do this step four, letters, but emails, we must link the template to the code. The reply to is whose email the donor can reply to if they have any questions. And you can add a CC or BCC. So if you would like to get copies of your email templates, they can go to that BCC. So update in the subject line. We can write out the subject line for your email.
You can also insert merge fields into the subject line in the message body here, here’s where you’re going to actually put in what the email is going to say.
So the trick that I like to use for the most part is I will just open up my Word document that I’ve created, copy the text with the merge fields included.
Oh, I’m doing very bad at copying and pasting today, and then I just do Control V to paste that message into my email, and I tell the system to clean up the formatting. So what it does is it at least copies the content that I want to include on the email.
And then wherever I see the merge fields that are from the letter template that have those brackets around them, those are going to be where I’m going to replace the word document merge fields with the merge fields for the email receipts, and it is as easy as clicking Insert Merge Field.
So if I want to replace salutation, I just go Insert Merge Field, type the word salutation and click on the field to select it, and it’s now going to replace it with the email receipt merge fields. Same thing with gift amount. I just highlight it, Insert Merge Field and look for gift amount.
So I just keep going in and just using the merge fields that were in my letter to guide my changes.
Now, when you’re working with COVID fields, you always want to insert the description so that it will say in memory or in honor of and not H or M, if Ithaca, does this trick work for you? Do you think this is something that you’re going to take advantage of? I apologize, I don’t know your name. It just looks like I have your organization’s name in there. Perfect. And then the cool thing about emails is that we can actually insert pictures in here as well, and it doesn’t cost us any additional pieces or money in printing cost. So if I want to insert an image, I just have to come into the toolbar and click Insert image. And I can either click on the folder icon to see images that I’ve uploaded previously. Oh, my God, you can see we love animals at this organization, or you can click on drop image, and this will let you upload an image from your desktop. So for me, I’m going to go ahead and just upload my organization’s logo, and you can use the toolbar when you click on the image to align your image. I’m. Perfect. Once you’re happy, you can come up to the top of the screen and click Save Template, and that will save your email. So I didn’t want to get too much into all the customization options, because we could be here all day talking about customizing every little aspect of the email. The goal was to really just show you where to go so you can start the process of customizing these.
Alrighty. So before I move on and start talking about how to generate the receipts. I want to take a moment and pause. Do I have any questions about the process for creating the thank you letter code, the letter template or the email template?
Are we all getting super excited to start building them? 
Alrighty. So let’s actually talk about generating your receipts. So in DonorPerfect, we actually give you two options when it comes to receiving. You can do them in a batch, where we go in and we generate tax receipts for multiple donors all at the same time, which is a great time saving measure if you have a lot of gifts, or if you’re an organization where you are mostly manually entering only two or three donations a week, or even 10 a week, you can thank the donor and receipt them from the gift screen. I have many clients that will do just batch receiving or just thank donor, and then I have clients who will use one over the other, depending on their volume. So we show you both, so that you can see both methods and pick whichever one works best for you. We’re going to start with the batch receiving though, which is, I would like to generate a large chunk of tax receipts all at the same time. So with batch receiving, we initiate this process under the receipts icon in the navigation bar, and when we are in there, we always recommend running what’s called the transaction listing report, because it gives you the opportunity to double check your data entry before you issue your receipt. So you can double check that yes, these are the donations that I would like to receipt, and you can also confirm that each donor has been assigned the correct thank you letter code. So in the chat, why do you guys think it would be important to double check the thank you letter code that is assigned to a donor’s record?
Why we want to make sure that the donor has the right thank you code assigned to them? Do? Exactly. Ithaca public education, it’s connected to the letter they receive. Exactly, it’s the message. It’s how we’re saying thank you. We wouldn’t want to send a memorial letter to someone who was not making a donation in memory of someone. Exactly. K Ellen, you need to make sure the letters are accurate and the proper letter goes to the correct donor. That is exactly right. If someone’s making a major gift, well, yes, we should be calling them, but also we should be sending them, potentially a thank you letter that speaks to the impact a major gift has compared to someone who might be a monthly donor. We love both, and we appreciate both, but we just communicate and the message around them is a little different. So we run the batch report to essentially validate everyone to sign the correct letter, and then we can do our tax receipts. So we do our tax receipts in five simple clicks. We start with our emails, we click the button, generate receipts, we select the email templates that we would like to receipt. Do not panic. I’m going to walk you through this process in the system. The slides are just to show you and introduce the flow. So we generate the receipts, we confirm and select the email templates we would like to receipt. We tell the system. Come to then take us to a preview for our emails, where we get to confirm that all of our merge fields are working as expected. And then we tell the system to send the email receipt. Once your email receipts are done, then we move to our letters. So letters are also initiated under generate receipts. Only this time we have to physically click on a radio button to say we would like to generate a letter receipt for this group, and you’re going to click the instant merge button. Instant merge will open up your Letter Template Library so the word documents that you uploaded to the program you and then you click Merge, and what will happen is you will get one word document that will have all of your letters included in it.
Alrighty, and I’m not going to talk about thank donor yet. We’re going to talk about that in just a minute, because what I would like to do is walk you guys through the batch receiving process. So again, we are in DonorPerfect, and we’re going to do a batch of receipts where I want to generate a large amount of tax receipts for multiple donors in DonorPerfect, I’m going to go to the receipts icon in the navigation bar.
And what I’m going to tell the database is that I would like to do my email and letter, tax receipts. And I would like to receipt all transactions. All transactions mean, let me receipt anything that has not yet been receipted, regardless of who did the data entry. User transactions means you can only receive donations that you’ve entered online form. Transactions means you can only receipt donations that have come in through an online form.
Current batch will always be selected because these are your group of donations that are waiting to be receipted to run the transaction listing report, which is how we double check our data entry We come down to review batch Reports recommended and you’re going to click the button browser, this is going to run the transaction listing report and show you the donations that are waiting to get a charitable receipt.
Which I think I am in the wrong system. Maybe give me one second I think I might have logged into the wrong system.
See, you guys, at least don’t have to worry about which system you’re logged into, because, ah, there we go. Okay, I was like, I know that I had way more donations than two. So these are going to be the list of my donations that are waiting to be receipted. The main thing that I’m paying attention to is this thank you letter column, or thank you number column, which is 1-234-567-8910, 1112, 1314, 15 columns from the left, this tells you which thank you letter the donor is receiving. In the case of Mike, Mike was missing a thank you letter code he has no thank you letter code assigned to his name. So if I want to correct this, I can just go into the second column where the gift amount is, right click on his $50 with my mouse and click Open link in a new tab. This will keep the transaction listing report open in my web browser, while allowing me to then go into a new tab that will open up right next to the transaction listing report, and it will allow me to then assign Mike the thank you letter that I want him to receive.
Now I can save the gift, and if I go back to the transaction listing tab and refresh refresh my web browser. Ooh, I can’t talk today. This will then allow me to see that Mike now has a thank you letter code assigned to him. So I validated that all of my donors have a thank you letter code assigned everybody’s thank you letter code is assigned correctly. So let’s go generate some receipts. Once we review our batch report and we are happy and we are ready to move forward with our receipt process, we are going to click the back button in your web browser, or I’m going to say you guys, will we scroll to the very bottom of the screen, and under receipts and acknowledgement options, you are going to click the button generate receipts. And this will start the process of doing a batch of receipt perfect. So for email receipts, which we always do, first, we click the Select button to select that I would like to generate email receipts for all of these different messages. Okay, and quick yes or no in the chat, yes or no, how many people recall that I mentioned for email receipts, you have to link the template to the thank you letter code, so just a quick yes or no. How many people recall that I mentioned you have to link the email receipt template to the thank you letter code template. Yes. Everyone’s saying yes. Thumbs up. I love it. This is the reason why for email templates. If we do not link the template to a thank you letter code. Then what happens is, when you go to generate your batch of receipts, you’re going to get a drop down that says no template assigned. It means DonorPerfect does not know which of the email templates to send to this donor. So while not a huge deal in this case, because this is one donor. And of course, I can come in and I can just choose the template from the drop down box. We want to minimize the amount of manual changes you have to make during the process. So by linking the thank you letter code to the email template, it just saves you one extra step in terms of not having to assign the email template you want to use from this screen. I love when mistakes like that happen, because I get to show you guys how to fix them. Alrighty, everything is assigned. Everything is linked to an email template. I’m going to click Next preview email receipts to preview my emails. So basically, what I’m doing here is I am just double checking that all of my merge fields are merging. So dear Joseph, your donation of $560 in honor of amber Fitzgerald. So this is my tribute. Thank You letter or my tribute. Thank you email so we can see that it not only pulls in the details about the gift amount and the date, but also who we were honoring or memorializing. At the bottom, you can click on the Next button, so if you want to review any. Every email before it goes out, you have the power to do that. The only thing you cannot do on this screen is you cannot edit the contents of the email. What you see is what the donor will receive if you want to edit the contents of an email. I’m going to show you that when we talk about thank donor.
But for batch receiving emails, we cannot change the content, righty, so once we’re done reviewing all of our emails, your last step is to click the button next send email receipts and send email receipts now, and that will send all of your email receipts out now for my letter receipts, You’re going to notice that I have a grid here that’s going to show all of my letter receipts that are waiting to be issued. So the one thing you will never click is never click all in one. All in one means that every person in this list will get the exact same letter. Instead, what you do is you go through the grid and you reissue, or you issue each letter type one by one by one. So I’m going to start with my in kind thank you letter, because that’s at the top. I’m going to come down and click the instant merge button at the bottom, find my in kind thank you letter template and select it and use the data from DonorPerfect to merge so and that’s going to download me a in kind thank you letter. Now I don’t know who created this template, so I’m not sure what I’m going to get perfect.
So this in kind thank you letter template is including the description of the item that was donated, so then I can keep going through my process of generating my monthly giving thank you letter by going to instant merge and finding the corresponding letter that matches the name in the grid, which it looks like I don’t have one. Okay, that’s fine. So I’m just going to do my standard thank you for this person and merge.
I can do my tribute thank you letter by clicking instant merge and finding my sample tribute and merging it.
Alrighty and for notification letters, we will not generate those on this screen. That is how we can send next of kin letters to family members when we want to notify them about Memorial gifts. Those are actually generated in a different part of the program so you can ignore notification letters. Once my receipts are all done, I’m going to click the Update batch number. What update batch number allows us to do is it allows us to say our receipt process is done for the day, and it allows you to then take all of those receipts and put them into a batch so that you do not re receipt them by accident, if you get unprocessed gifts, what this means is you either have donations that you’ve entered and indicated that you do not want to receipt, or these are donors that received a charitable receipt through the online forms product so they are considered unprocessed, because DonorPerfect did not issue the charitable receipt for you. When you click yes update batch, it’ll tell you that 14 records were included in. Batch and that they are put into batch 106, what this leaves you with now is you now have a blank slate in your transaction listing report. So now you can start entering in your next round of donations for your next receipt batch. So batch receiving is great if you have a large amount of donations that you want to be able to just receipt all at once, or if you’re an organization that likes to enter your receipts throughout the week and then just receipt everything on a Friday, or enter all of your donations for the month and do all of your receipts at the end of the month. But there’s data in the industry that suggests that when we receive donors within 48 hours of receiving their gift, we have a higher likelihood of retaining them. So if you want a way to quickly receipt donors as you’re entering the data, and if you want a way to edit the email template for a donor by donor basis, you can take advantage of our thank donors from the gift screen. What this allows you to do is this allows you to as soon as you’re done entering a gift issue, the receipt to the donor, and you can do an email or a letter receipt. It’s super easy. I’m going to show you how to do it, and it’s so quick, it’s my preferred way of doing receipts. So if I go into Quick Search and open up a donor’s record, my good old friend Roger sandstone, I and I go to his gift tab to create a gift, and let’s do another Memorial gift so you guys can See the template that we built. It was $150 donation that was made by a check I’m going to send the tribute. Thank you. Webinar.
If I want to receive this gift, I just come into the white ribbon, two buttons over from the save button and click on thank donor, and I can choose to send an email or a letter receipt. I’m going to do email.
What happens is it’s going to pull up the email template that is linked to my thank you letter code. It’s pulling in Dear Lisa and Roger, thank you for your gift of $150 on this date. Now I didn’t put in anyone that they were memorializing, so the system actually suppressed the memorial fields for me. Had I clicked apply to attribute, and I said I wanted to designate that this was in memory of Apollo the cat. Then when I go to thank donor and send the email, it should pool in honor or in memory of Apollo the cat. I don’t remember how we set that one up. Let’s take a looky. Yes, $150 in memory of Apollo the cat, and if I want, I can come in and add my own text or message here. So we actually have the ability to customize the email before it goes out to the donor.
And then we just click Send Email and the receipt is out the door. So it’s not that one method is better than the other, it’s just which one is going to fit your guys workflow the best. And it could be just one batch receiving or thank donor, or it could be a combination of both, where we use thank donor throughout the year and maybe batch receding when we have our end of year appeals and we get the most donation. Either option works for you, but ultimately it comes back to making sure that you have those thank you letter codes set up. And that you have your letter and email templates loaded into the program. So to recap, what we’ve covered, because we’ve covered quite a bit, the thank you letter field is always what you want to create first when you’re ready to start creating your receiving process. Thank You letter field is going to indicate which of your specific thank you letters the donor will receive during the receiving process. And then once you have your codes created, you can use DonorPerfect templates to create your email and letter receipt so and we always advise using our sample templates so that you can get some suggestions on potential fields to incorporate into those templates to create more personalized receipts for your donors. Then you can do your receipts either through batch receiving, where in five simple steps, you can generate large amounts of tax receipts for different donors, or you can use thank donor from the gift screen, and that will let you receipt donors on a gift by gift basis. And with emails, gives you the capability to customize them on a donor by donor basis, just giving you even more opportunity to delight your donors and build that relationship that’s ultimately going to lead to donor retention.
So with that said, it’s the end of our content for today. I apologize I kept you for three whole extra minutes. But I hope it was all helpful in terms of, will you guys be getting this PowerPoint? You will not get the specific PowerPoint that I presented today, but you will get a copy of this recording link sent to you. So I hope you guys are all walking away feeling inspired and excited to start working through setting up your receipts. I hope you all have a great rest of your day, and I really look forward to seeing you in some future webinars. Bye.