Receipting 101

All right. I have my camera on today, but in case they didn’t Hi, I’m Shawn Botero. This is what I look like when I have facial hair. And my dog was still small enough to sit on the back of the couch. She still tries to but she’s a little too Read More

All right. I have my camera on today, but in case they didn’t Hi, I’m Shawn Botero. This is what I look like when I have facial hair. And my dog was still small enough to sit on the back of the couch. She still tries to but she’s a little too big now anyway, doesn’t stop her any. All right, starting off with a quote some statistics. According to the book donor survey, 45% of donors said it was an outstanding thank you that inspired them to give this quote always makes me think back to when I was a kid for birthdays or holidays, you get a gift. And then it’s usually a good idea to write some type of acknowledgment

that you were given something, they didn’t have to donate anything out of the goodness of their heart, but they decided to so one, it is the polite thing to do. But second, it is also going to encourage those people to give again,

turn my camera off here so we can get into today’s topic. This one, I’m going to try to breeze through some of the PowerPoint slides before we get into the live demo within DonorPerfect but what topics we’re going to be covering today. Oddly enough, I’m actually going to be starting off with the end results. Taking a look at what the end result is going to be whether that is a email receipt, or that is a physical letter receipt, going to start off with the end results before taking a step back. And seeing all the little elements that went into the generation of that receipt.

There’s gonna be a handful of elements going on here of the thank you Template field, it might be called something slightly different in your database. It probably has the word thank you in there, it might say thank you letter, or something to that effect, but it is on the gift screen. And the use of this field is to designate which particular template that that donor is going to receive.

Ideally, I would say you should have some type of general thank you letter for your run of the mill donation. But if you were bringing in donations from like a specific events, or a specific fundraising effort, it would behoove you to have a different templates that are pointing out the way that that person donated, acknowledging what was unique about the way that they donated.

And there are going to be two different formats of receipts that we can generate. One of them is a mail merge template. This is the physical letter file that you’ll be generating and then printing off. This will as a side note require you to have a Microsoft Word installed. There’s many software’s out there that look pretty similar. Google Docs. For one, Google Docs looks exactly like Microsoft Word, Google Docs isn’t going to work here. Microsoft Word installed is our one and only for creating these Mail Merge templates, email templates, though, we got you right there, all of these emails that you’re going to be designing that is all done directly within the database. I’m also going to walk you through the receipt process step by step so that we can generate these in bulk. But there is a newer and quicker way to generate a receipt directly from the data entry screen as that gift is being added than a little caveat that we have here for this webinar as we do for all of them.

The contents of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. Everything within DonorPerfect is customizable. You can rename fields, you can move them around, you can create your own fields. So especially when we’re in the live demo portion of the webinar today, and we’re looking in my webinar database, things might look a little bit different from what you have on your ends.

So starting off with the end result, how do we get from entering gift data to using it in a letter A here I’m going to highlight on this example of a handful of different things that should be included in are going to be a part of the end result here. Or the end result being that receipt that we’re generating, whether it’s an email, whether it’s a letter, we should be including the date of gift and the gift amounts. Bare minimum. Does this webinar cover Canadian receipts are only American Kevin, this is for us receeding. Specifically, apologies to any of our Canadian friends that are out there. The Canadian Revenue Agency has very particular requirements for their receiving process. I ended that is not going to be covered today. Unfortunately, yeah, sorry about that. Kevin, you’re welcome.

But in these receipts that we’re generating, bare minimum

date of gift and the gift amount should be included. Now, if you wanted to go a little bit extra with your template, and you wanted to include a little something about where that money is destined for, you could choose to include the general ledger code, that General Ledger code being used to CAPTCHA which fund that money is going to be used for the building fund in this example.

Then we have the thank you letter code, which in this example, a golf Thank you, there was a golf events. So the template that we’re going to use to acknowledge this is going to be specifically tailored to that fundraising effort.

And lastly, it might be something that you look over while you’re generating these receipts, but it’s something to be aware of is this associated address during data entry. Now when you’re adding a new gift for a person, it’s going to default to the address that is listed on the main screen. But if your donor has more than one address, this associated address field is a drop down menu that will also feature the other alternate addresses that this donor may have. What’s that? What’s that going to look like once it is in an actual letter, here, we have a mail merge template. Again, this is a Word document where all of that person’s information has merged into, we have the address block here that’s taking that associated address.

And within the body of the letter, we have the gift amount, we have the date of gift. And we have the general ledger description listed out here as well, showing that that money went towards the building funds. And based off the document title that we have up here, we can see the correlation between that thank you template and the end results. So since we decided on a thank you letter, option of golf, thank you. The end result is that we’re merging it into this letter that is specifically mentioning that event that drove that donation, and then performing the same task but in a different format, we have the email templates.

Here we have a little drop down menu, where conceivably you could select the different email templates that you have available to you. But since during data entry that thank you template code was selected, once we go and merge this, we can see all that information populating here, the donors email address, we have their name, the amount they gave when they gave it and where that money is going to.

So before you even start going down this path, there are a few things that you should have set up in advance. One is the thank you template fields. Again, yours might call this something slightly different. It might say something like thank you letter, or thank you code. Either way that these are all the thank you Template field that is going to be living on the gift screen. And it identifies which specific message that the donor should be receiving. I’m going to take a quick audience poll and informal poll a little bit later. Because I’m running out of ideas for unique templates to create. The last time that I did this webinar, somebody somebody had recommended creating a receipt template for an event that they had called black ties and blue jeans, which is a fun event. So if you could think of a good event or a good fundraising situation that we might want to be generating a unique acknowledgment for a unique receipt for let me know I’m running out of ideas in my improv skills are lacking.

We’re going to have to set up that mail merge template which if you’re joining us a little late the mail merge template. This is the physical letter received that we’ll be getting generated from this process. And it will require you to have a Microsoft Word in order to create this thank you Template field should have options for all of your different Mail Merge templates. And if you just started off with DonorPerfect today, there are going to be a number of sample templates that are already in your system. But don’t worry if you accidentally deleted it. You will be able to redownload those I’ll show you where our depository of all of those templates is.

And we do have a number of them already formatted app Boy, that two dozen at least maybe 20 to 30. But we have a lot of different templates that you have access to that have, you know fake information in it, but it has functional fields in it. We’ll take a look at how you can use our samples to customize your own

Whether that’s editing our template, or maybe if you have your own letterhead already, just copy and paste,

email templates, all of that can be created. Within DonorPerfect, there should be a number of sample templates available to you already. But just in case they’re not, you can always create those from scratch. And there’s no need to, you know, no need to have another software to create those email templates for you. It’s also much easier to create these email templates. Whereas with the physical letters, the merge fields, the smart fields that will be merging information into it

have to be copied and pasted or created from scratch with the email templates, there’s a drop down, Hey, you want to add the general ledger description to that email template, just select it from a drop down, easy peasy.

So starting off with the thank you letter code, this thank you letter or thank you template code, it represents the specific template that is going to be used once we actually receipt, this gift. And there’s a couple of different ways to do it, I’m going to show you the quickest way, which is to just click on the plus symbol next to that drop down menu and add your new code. We could also go into code maintenance to do this as well. And as I am going into the database here in just a moment, opening the floor up to not questions but in the questions box. If you could

give me an event give me a fund raising effort, because I know I already have templates for I have templates in this webinar database for golf events. I have sample templates for giving Tuesday fundraising efforts and other similar things. So if anybody has, if anybody has anything unique, I’d be more than happy.

Oh, Jen, Jen, this is solid.

Oh, these are good. Okay, so Jen is for a type of thank you a Moveable Feast. I’d be curious to see what your organization does. Trap shoot fundraiser. That’s actually that’s fairly common. I’ve talked to a couple of different nonprofits that have some type of fundraising

trapshooting or skeet shooting element to it. That’s a fun day. How do I add the thank you template to the main page magazine. Unfortunately, that is not an option. From the home screen, we’re going to be getting a bunch of different data points. But receding is not going to be done from here. We’re going to have to start off with data entry like we start off with most things. Let me go to Johnny No at all. If you were here for our importing webinar yesterday, we added a Johnny No at all yesterday.

Over shell I liked that I liked that one too. We’ve got many options here that we could work with. So here’s Johnny No at all, a very real now he’s not he’s fake donor in my webinar system. Johnny hasn’t donated just yet. So I am going to add a gift from Johnny. Let’s say it was $100. The type of gift that’s going to be the format of the donation, let’s say it was a check, in which case we can put in the reference number.

Even though it is fake. I still like having clean data. So I’m going to make sure that we have appropriate codes that are going to be used here.

And let me see briefly. I’m going to the questions here.

Let me see.

You know what I’m going with the Rural lot, there were a lot of great options here.

Okay, I’m liking the Midwestern salad competition. That’s going to be the new Thank you template that I’m going to be creating for this. And ideally, since that

meant the sense of the salad competition. Just for brevity sake here. I’m going to cut out the Midwestern part of it Sadie because I am a slow typer and I call this the salad competition.

And I’m even going to get as specific as the year salad competition 2023 As a reminder from refresher from data entry 101. A solicitation is used to record the individual fundraising effort. If we had donations come in from an individual fundraising effort in this case of the salad competition. It would be a great idea if we had a thank you template that is specifically

for that, right from here, right from the data entry screen, I have this little plus symbol, I can click, click on the plus symbol. And I can add that code right from here, just like I did with the solicitation.

Let me spell salad correctly. There we go.

Perfect. So now we have the code that represents what our desired end result is going to be a specific template. That is just for salad donations

from that salad competition.

I hope there’s ranch there to love ranch. But let me save this for now, that’s going to be the gift that ultimately gets receded. As a little side note here. Another way that we could have added that code is through code maintenance underneath settings. From this area here, we have a drop down menu that lists every single drop down menu in the database, every single one of but this is the one I’m concerned with the thank you template on the gift screen. If I click on go, I can see all the ones that we have here, including the new salad competition code that I’ve created here. And I could have clicked on this Add button to add one from here.

So now that we have our code for this specific template, we need to actually create that template first start, I’m going to start off with the letter templates. Just because there’s a couple extra steps along the way towards generating this, all of your mail merge templates that are going to be stored underneath settings, that little gear icon at the top right. And then from there, go down to mail merge templates, here in this little preview, if you’ve never touched this area before, these are going to be some of the options that you have. You’ll have like a general outreach letter and end of your tax letter, really the one we’re going to be focused in on as far as samples go is the letter. Thank you. This is a generic Thank you template that we could play around with in a couple different ways I could either take that sample template, and I can edit around it because it already has the fields in it, I need. Or I could copy from there and paste into my own version, which is probably the more likely scenario. If you happen to for some reason, clicked on these trash cans and deleted those sample templates. And you’re not really sure where to start off right at the bottom rates, looking for pre made templates, we got you covered in the knowledge base, that link is very helpful. That’s where the 20 to 30 Different already generated templates live.

So you can always go back and find one of our samples, if you need to play around with it a little bit later.

Here’s what it looks like. Once it’s downloaded, here’s what it looks like. Again, it is going to list at the top Hey, this is a template it needs to be updated on his politics Foundation, that’s not a real thing.

We have an address block here. Anything that we’re seeing with these little funny greater than less than symbols on either side of these fields. These are merge fields when I say merge fields that we’re talking about. So dear, here’s a merge field for salutation. Salutation will merge into there. And then within the body of the letter A we have the gift amount and we have the gift date.

And because this is a sample, maybe you want to include some other fields. Down at the bottom, we have a number of popularly used

different templates. Oh Jen, I’m going to show you in just a moment where we can find these, just doing a quick overview. Before I get into that. It is going to be listed underneath settings and mail merge templates. So once you download that sample, which we’ll get to in a moment, you’re going to copy and paste fields from our sample, put it into your own version. Save that template, save that Word document and then upload it back into DonorPerfect enough chat. Let’s get to it. Let’s go back in to my webinar system here.

And underneath settings, we can go to mail merge templates. Here’s where all of them reside. I know the sample template that I’m interested in is already live

loaded into my webinar system. What I’m going to do though is I’m going to show you where we can find the collection of all of our pre made templates. Down here at the bottom right looking for pre made templates, we got you covered in the knowledge base, I

usually like to right click on this and open it in a new tab. Otherwise, it will redirect you out of DonorPerfect, you don’t have to log back in later. But here’s all of them envelopes. If you’re using envelopes for a variety of different letters, we even have if you’re using a label makers, we even have a number of Avery labels that are here, but the one that I’m looking for, refresh my memory, it’s general.

Yeah, here we go. General, thank you letter. That’s the one. If you click on the file name that’s in blue, it’ll show you a little bit of a preview of what it looks like. The preview isn’t always indicative of how it actually looks, it does look a little funky. But what we’re going to want to do is we’re going to want to download this, and then open up that word file.

And see, where did we go? Here we go. Let me bump this over here.

All right, and here’s here’s what it looks like. If I uploaded this to my database, it would be a functional template that I could use.

Melissa font is asking, Is it possible to use your own?

And how would you upload it? We’re gonna get there, Melissa? Right now, this is Coral acres, a lot of our samples have some type of fake nonprofit on it. Coral acres is not a real thing. What is real and functioning, though, are the merge fields that we’re seeing in here, we have the address block,

we have the salutation. And then within the body, we have the amount and we have the date of gifts. If we wanted to get fancier, we could maybe include some of these other fields, as well. But in this case, really, the ones that I’ve highlighted so far are going to be the ones that we use the address block the salutation and these two gift fields within the body. There’s also a way to include a field that automatically generates with today’s date. I’ll show you how to do that. But let’s start off with a brand new blank Word document.

And here we go. Now, a little caveat here. I am not a Microsoft Word expert. But I dabble. I dabble. I dabble. I can do a handful of things. Starting off, you know, you always have to have your cursor where you want the thing to go. Let’s put in some branding here.

And let me see what can I put in here I have a bunch of random silly pictures.

You know what, here’s a group photo of me and my colleagues, let’s put that in there. Somewhere within this massive picture is oh, there’s me, John, Jonathan, you weren’t able to make it here to this one. But here’s a here’s everybody a DonorPerfect. This is what we all look like.

Ideally, you’d be putting in your own logo, your own branding, things to that effect.

Either way, though, inserting of that picture is going to happen from the Insert tab. Now I’m using Microsoft Word 2016, you might be using a slightly different version of Microsoft Word. But from what I’ve seen,

the differences are very, very small. The picture option is going to be underneath this Insert tab. And also underneath this Insert tab, we’re going to have the option of including

if you so choose a field that automatically populates with today’s date, that’s also going to be underneath the insert tab. And it’s going to be over here to the right. It may say date and time. But the logo is most likely going to be this little calendar with a clock. If I click on it, I can get specific with the format that I want this to be in and I definitely want it to be updating automatically.

So I’ll say okay,

let me go down a couple spaces here for the address block. And let me minimize that. Here we go and, you know, address block down the salutation. I’m going to highlight all of this. And I’m going to copy it

CTRL C, you could also right click and copy there. But this is what I want in my version.

Oops. Hey, get back here.

There we are. Here’s my version back ends.

Now we can paste that in.

There we go. So now we have a functioning address block. And here is where I have nothing but faith that you are going to put in a more heartfelt message than what I am about to put in.

Thank you so much for coming to our salad competition and donating. And then here is where I can put in

the gift amount and the date of gift. Again, it’s going to go back to my sample and I’m going to copy and paste it over

thank you so much for donating this gift amounts on date of gifts.

And I’ll pop those in.

Thank you so much. And then down here, you would put maybe your your CEO Sean Botero, Executive Director of salads

all right. So this is going to be the end results. You’ll have your own branding in here, you’ll have a heartfelt message thanking them for their donation getting specific about what brought that money in.

From here though, I’m going to save it.

And let’s see, let’s pump this on my desktop. Let’s call this our salad competition. Thank you.

Still a Word document. So now this is this is the template, it’s going to merge with all the donors information. But I still need to get it back into DonorPerfect. Right now it just exists on my computer. So to get it back into DonorPerfect, I’m gonna mosey on back to the mail merge templates screen. And I’m going to click on Upload New at the bottom right.

From here, I’m going to browse my computer that will open up the file explorer. And from this file explorer, I can find on my desktop, the salad competition, thank you. Now, when you are uploading these for the first time, you have to be aware of the template type.

The template type, if we’re going to be using this in receipts, needs to be gifts slash pledge. There are gift fields on this document on this mail merge template, we’re going to be using it in the receiving process, we’re going to have to give it a template type of gift pledge. Otherwise, it’s not going to show up as an available option.

The other option of Maine bio that will be used for some type of general outreach letter.

Awesome, perfect. Now, I have my salad competition. Thank you, this will be ready for me to use in the receiving process. And if I ever wanted to see what it looked like, because I wasn’t sure what’s it, that’s our competition, thank you. I can click on this gray download arrow next to it. And I can open it up just to see its contents. And make sure it’s the way I want to go. Perhaps edit it, perhaps re upload it. But for now that one is good to go. But I you know, it’s probably likely maybe for some of the folks in my database that I might not have a mailing address for those folks. And if that is the case, we’re gonna want to send them an email. Ideally, if we have an email, we should be getting in touch with them somehow. Email Templates. This isn’t anything additional that you need. Everybody’s going to have access to these email templates unless you goofed up and someone removed your permissions. Email Templates are going to be something you have access to.

Email Templates are stored in a different area. I wish they weren’t but they are at the top of DonorPerfect. There’s an icon that looks like an envelope. Underneath that envelope drop down menu is going to be email templates. That’s where all of these are going to live.

Cynthia, we’re going to get into how to merge to merge that letter. We’re gonna go over the emails and we’ll we’ll get to that next.

All right, so within the body of

At email, we’re going to have a lot of the same options. And we’re also going to refer to them as merge fields, we were seeing some of them. In this example here, we have a merge field for salutation, we have a merge field for gift amount for date of gift for the general ledger code. What’s going to be nice, then

what’s going to be nice is that there’s no copying and pasting necessary, there’s going to be this big button here to insert a merge fields. And that’s how we’re going to add all of these smart fields, the merge fields.

And again, unlike Microsoft Word,

there is no auto save option, this big blue button here, this is going to be your friends, just make sure that you’re saving these there’s no auto save, I hate to see all your hard work go away, because you forgot to save and navigated away, whatever the case may be, make sure we’re clicking on this big blue button before we navigate away. All

right, let me hop back in here.

Alright, so underneath mailings, this is the drop down menu I was referring to. And we can go to our email templates. Here, we see all of our different email templates that are listed out here historically, but we also have this big plus symbol here that we can use to create a new one. The template name, then I’m going to give it is going to be the same as my thank you letter code, really salad competition, throw t y in there. And then I’m also going to connect to this email template. To that thank you let her code

salad competition. So this email template that I’m creating right now, any gift that has this thank you code on it, a DonorPerfect is going to know that when it’s receipt time, this is the template that we’re going to use the from email address, I gotta be careful and stop using my real work email address, because I keep on getting

responses from these as Pateros a DonorPerfect. So yeah, let’s make this incorrect.

Something else that I would say you should do as well. It’s a good idea to blind copy somebody internally on these email templates make the screen smaller, the left side is cut off.

About now can you see that a little bit better. Let me know.

I might have to scroll around a little bit here. But here’s the option for a blind copy a BCC. That’s how we can let somebody know in terminally that we have sent a receipt out and it’ll also Oh, Amy, you’re welcome. Awesome. I’m sure excited myself. So I tried to be very conscious of

other people who

might need a little help saying

Here we go info at DonorPerfect.com. So while it is pretty easy to generate these email receipts, if your donor accidentally deletes it, blind copying somebody internally is going to make sure that we have a copy of that that we can quickly send off to the donor.

Subject line like all emails have Thank you. We can put the salutation in here. Here it is no copying and pasting needed. We have the Insert Merge Field button where it gives oops.

It gives me the option of picking and choosing any field from the main or the gifts screen any of them, it’ll let me do any of them. And it’s a big list all of the fields on the main the bio the gift in the pledge screen. So what I always do is just use this little search box to find my field of interest. There it is salutation

then we get into the body of the email itself. So from here

from here, we can edit what’s actually going to be sent in the body. There’s an acronym for what this type of email editor is WYSIWYG, I’ve heard it referred to as this is a what you see is what you get.

Type editor

can be hard for people going from Microsoft Word to this but our options are what they are.

Here though we also do have a smart function here to insert today’s date

and just like we did before, dear

or we can insert the salutation.

Thank you for your donation, and we can put in the gift amount

on

the date of gifts

and we also hear Do you have the ability to put images in

we have some align options on make it center justified.

This Insert Image button right here looks like a little portrait of a mountain scape. If you click on that, it will allow you to click on this box, that’ll open up your file explorer where you can pick from your computer, one of the images that you have there. Alternatively, if you’ve ever created one of these email templates before, you can browse that image library and finds one of those images, perhaps it’s an image of your puppy that you posted recently, but never removed from your database. And you’re a dog person. So you want to include that. You certainly can you can insert images, you can replace them, and you only need to bring them in once. Also, you could insert a hyperlink if need to.

But it’s probably not going to be a picture of your dog who call you taking a picture of her out through your window, it’s probably going to be probably gonna be a professional looking logo that you add on to your email template. Now I’m gonna practice what I preach and click on Save Template. Before we move on to actually generating these receipts.

We have a button for that it’s called receipts, it’s a well named button, that’s going to be at the top of your screen. And clicking on it is going to take you to this screen right here. Where right off the bat, you’re going to have the option of selecting Hey, do we want to do all the emails first do we want to do all the letters do we want to do both. And then down here at the bottom, we got this big old generate receipts button that you can click on. But hold your horses, folks, before you click on that generate receipts button. What I would strongly advise that you do is to run a little report first. In this section here review batch Reports recommended it is

click on screen. What this is going to do is it’s going to show you each and every gift that’s about to be included in this process. Here’s where you can spot check, maybe there’s somebody that should have been there, but isn’t or somebody who is there but shouldn’t be for some reason, we’ll we’ll be able to get a sky high glimpse of who all is going to be included in this receding process. Before we go along and do it.

This is going to be what it looks like. This is the batch report that’s listing out all of the different donations.

Now because these different gifts might be receiving for letters, you know for letters, you might be sending out different Thank you template codes. No matter what if you are sending out different

thank you letter templates, for the different donations that need to have a receipt generated for it, they’re still all probably going to have the same envelope and the same labels that you use. So right from here, this is also a good opportunity to generate some some of those letters, or envelopes I should say.

So once you’ve reviewed the batch report, everything looks kosher and good to go. You’re finally ready to click on Generate receipts. If you happen to be doing both letters and emails. At the same time, it’s going to start you off with the emails first, you’re gonna be able to get through it and more or less five clicks.

So click on Generate receipts. From there, it’s going to take you to this screen. Here we’re going to see

perhaps multiple different rows with different templates that are to be used during this process. In this example, though, we only have one row, what we’re going to need to do is there’s a little checkbox that’s hiding behind this two star here. Behind that we’ll check that box off, and then we’re going to click on next

Preview email receipts, you are always always always going to have to preview these email receipts before you actually generate them. It is an email, there’s no taking it back on fortunately,

once it’s out its out. And again, we only have one gift to acknowledge in this example. But down here, you can navigate through all of the emails that are about to be sent. Spot, check the see if there’s anything wrong if a name is misspelled if information is missing, things like that. And then you can click on next, send email receipts to actually send those email receipts but not really, you’re still gonna get another warning message that says, A, hey, this is an email, we can’t take this back, please make sure that you’ve double check these emails. We can’t take those emails back. And then finally, once you click on that button, for reals, you’re going to send out those emails to everybody that was included in that group. Letters, it’s going to be a similar process for the letters.

One, you’re going to click on Generate receipts,

assuming we’ve already moved through the emails.

Here’s here’s food for thought. This is a good question. Kim’s asking, is there a reason you would want to do both emails and letters, it really depends on your constituency, your donor base and the way that you’re choosing to communicate with them.

Oftentimes, though, you know, all Nonprofits and Charities being a little community, a community of many people from many walks of life of many generations,

they’re going to have different contact preferences. And we’re also going to have different varieties of contact info that we have for them. Perhaps for some folks, we have any we only have an email address, we want to be able to send them a letter, and vice versa as well.

So once we get to this screen, this is where we’re going to be generating the letters from, it’s doing something very similar that the email screen was doing, where it’s grouping all of the gifts to be receded by their thank you letter code. Like here’s a row for the thank you letter code for the building fund. Thank you. There’s another one here for the General, thank you for your run of the mill donation, perhaps looks like we have five here from a board member, thank you code. These were board members that donated and we have a specific template for that. The gifts have that thank you template code on them. Here we’re seeing them listed out, what are you going to have to do is go through one by one, select the group of donations that you want to generate for click on Insert Merge Down here at the bottom. After you click on Insert, merge, it is going to show you the list of all of your templates. From there, you will select your template. And then lastly, you can click on merge. Because whether it was five or a dozen or 20 or 100 letters that you just generated, do yourself a little dance. You’ve just saved yourself a lot of time.

So enough talk let’s get into it. Let’s go into receipts here.

Right I know I did, but I’m paranoid about it. Gotta make sure that this is saved. Nice. Okay. So I’m going to click on receipts. And we could do these all at once. I’m kind of I’m going to break these down though. I’m gonna uncheck letter, we’ll do the emails first, and then we’ll do the letter second. And like I said, earlier, we got this big old generate receipts button, which I’m not going to click on just yet. I want to review this batch report. Let’s make sure that I have all my ducks in a row before I actually go about doing this.

Uh huh. We have a bunch here set to receive emails. I’m seeing names I recognize I’m seeing donations that I recognize. We’re probably good to go with these emails. So I can go back we still just have email selected there.

Now I can click on Generate receipts. And

we’re seeing a little bit of evidence of inconsistent data entry

just a little bit

because it looks like there are some gifts here that have like a thank you code of building fund. Thank you, but it was not

We’re actually selected.

We’re connected to that specific template. Now, what I’m not seeing here

is the donation from Johnny No at all, for the salad competition, quick informal poll, any guess as to what I didn’t do when I was entering that gift, that is excluding it from this list right here. And I can even

if I wanted to, I could click on. Look, there were two gifts here that didn’t have a thank you code assigned. I can click on that, too. And it’ll show me Yeah, we got Roger sandstone. And if even if I went back to that review batch reports.

Johnny note all wasn’t listed there. Either. You the template is in there. So for something like this, like we have one gift here, from Shawn McClellan that had the building fun, thank you. And I can click on this drop down menu and I can cycle through all of my different templates, including the salad competition, I can always decide after the fact that I want to use a different template while I’m generating these. But no, that was thank you for indulging me as a bit of a trick question. What I failed to do was, if I can get my screen to move over here,

if we go back

if we go back, and we go to Johnny No at all, there is a field that I completely glossed over. And I didn’t mention it. It wasn’t highlighted

in my slide deck in PowerPoint even

it’s this field right here. Receipts delivery preference.

This is going to decide when we’re you know, when we’re generating these in bulk, how we handle these, we could do letter

we could do email and letter or we could do do not acknowledge if we don’t want to acknowledge this at all.

In this case, though, we want to do email and letter. So I can acknowledge this donation in a couple different ways.

Now when I go back to receipts, still all uncheck letter, blood when I go to generate receipts.

Here is our salad competition. If I click on that, number one, we can see Johnny No at all.

Let’s see there were two gifts here that didn’t have a thank you code on them.

Let’s do that. Now we have a general thank you that we can use for this annual appeal. I don’t think we have one, I’ll just use the standard acknowledgement.

This is our catch all type template that we can use. So now we have all the gifts, we still need to check them all off on the left hand side.

I can zoom a little bit again, apologies about this.

This is as much as we can see apologies.

Now that we have all of these checked off, we can do next preview email receipts.

We have 13 in total that we’re going to work through. And ideally, you’ll be going through these spot checking these for error, see if anything is incorrect is Betty’s name spelled correctly? Do we have the information populating in there correctly? Once we have confirmed that we can do, we can click on next send email receipts, and then we can send email receipts now. Bam, now we’re done. And we can move on with our letters.

That’s

it, it’s being asked about tribute receipts.

If we’re doing

attributes, what I would say is from our sample template, if you wanted to include some tribute information, our sample template has a field for attribute name and the attribute type. So if it was in memory of Betty White, that attribute type would be in memory of the person’s name. In this case, Betty White would be the attribute name. So you would want to include those in the process. Also getting asked What if you needed to make changes to that

email receipt before it went out? That preview screen that we were seeing there were

Regretably will not allow you to make any edits. If during that preview, you noticed that a donors name was misspelled, well, that email is pulling from the donors record, you would have to go back to that person’s record and fix the spelling of their name from there. If you notice that within the body of the letter that you misspelled a word, you got to go back to the email template. Regrettably, it is not going to allow you to fix any mistakes from there.

Like just like Johnny No at all.

Johnny, that guy, he’s he works for us. Now he’s he’s got to get his act in shape.

Let’s move on to the letters now. And I’m going to show you the quickest way that you can generate a receipt. So I unchecked email. Let me go let me review my batch reports. Nice, nice, Johnny No at all. And his $100 donation is showing up again, because I selected to send an email and a letter. That’s why for the letters Johnny is showing up here in this list as well.

And then with just letter selected, now we can move on to the keys.

So very, very similar to what we had before.

But let’s do our salad competition. I’m going to select that one. There is one gift in here that was selected for this template and the salad competition.

There it is, there’s Johnny No at all. And then I can check the box next to that group of donations are in this this case, it is just one.

And then I can click on Insert Merge.

Here’s our template salad competition, thank you.

And then I can merge down here my little word file popped up. In here it is.

We have the auto populating dates still we have the address block that populated in EU salutation did not populate in there. I know I put the salutation field in there. I put Gift Amount and I put date of gift in there.

But what’s going on here? Why didn’t it salutation populate?

Well, if I go back and I look at Johnny’s record here, I know exactly what happened. I did this just yesterday, we added johnny johnny No at all to the system when we imported them, Johnny doesn’t have a salutation. So if that field is blank, it is not going to populate.

It’s not gonna populate. John A, here we go. Now it will, if I were to do it again, it would.

So from here, there isn’t a way to do all of these all at once, you’ll have to select the group, you know, we have our major donor Thank you, you’ll select instant merge, select the template to be used, and then merge from there. In the interest of time, I’m not going to go through all of these, it’s all. So it’s all very similar, but with different templates.

But what I am going to show you is how to quickly get a receipt out right from the data entry screen. This is the quickest most

effective way to do it. While you’re entering that donation.

From the gift screen, it’ll look a little something like this, you’re going to have that thank donor option there at the top, click on the thank donor, select what you want to send either an email or a letter.

And then after you select the template that you want to use, it’ll either send that email or generate that letter to be printed off and it will populate with a thank you date indicating that it has been receded and does not need to be done again.

So now that I’ve fixed up Johnny’s record a little bit. Let’s do that. Let’s go back to Johnny No at all. Let’s go to his gifts.

And we do have a we have a salutation here now. So that should be populating. I can go to gifts. And I could have done this when I added it for the first time but I’m gonna go back after the fact and edit it.

And right from here, I can do think donor and I can choose Send a letter. It’s gonna give me that same pop up that I did that I saw before in the receipts module. It’s going to let me pick from all of my different options. Here’s the salad competition

And, drumroll please do we have a salutation? Yes, we do. So the the field for salutation was working just fine. But if there’s no data in that field, it’s just not going to populate. So that’s what was going on there. And I can also send an email. What’s nice about sending an email from this screen is that unlike the bulk receiving process, oops, we don’t have an email for John, you’re going to need that. It will allow you to edit this email right from here.

So if there’s any misspellings if there’s anything incorrect, it will allow you to edit the email.

Right from here, we have all the same editing options, obviously, we’re going to need, we’re going to need an email address that’s there.

And then, then off we go.

All right, so just to recap, the purpose of the thank you Template field, that is defining which particular template that that person should be receiving.

Before you even do this, you’re gonna have to set up those email and those letter templates, you’re going to have a number of sample templates provided for you, make sure you’re customizing those, get rid of the coral acres Animal Rescue that’s in there and make it your own. Whether you’re doing emails or letters, you’re gonna be able to do those within five clicks. But the quickest way is still going to be able to be doing it directly from the data entry screen.

All right, and we are at time. Thank you for everybody for being here. My amazing assistant, Jonathan, has been very diligent about answering all these questions. I’m very blessed on days like this. Because I normally have to pale I have to pay attention to the question section. But Jonathan has graced me with his intellect today, and is helping me out we’re gonna see a little bit more of Jonathan, he’s gonna be doing some of these webinars. So a big thank you to Jonathan. Amy, Amy, thanking Jonathan. He’s been helping out a lot of people in chat today. I appreciate you, buddy. But but this is your opportunity. If anybody else has any questions, by all means, we can hang out for a few more minutes.

Ah, is there a description of the code somewhere?

18. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more Ria, looking for descriptions of what the fields were and what their purposes are? Or were you looking for more information on like the options that are within a drop down menu? Oh, the first one. So let me find this here. I’m going to I’m going to teach a person to fish. And that’s a little condescending. I’m going to show you our knowledge base here. There is an article I’m going to have to look this up a couple of different ways. But

right now I’m going to the knowledge base. From the question mark bubble at the top right, everybody should have access to this. This is our online repository of articles, videos, anything. And with this search box, I believe it’s called all fields. There is an article that we have in here that lists out I think this one might be a I’m gonna put this in chat if this is a

no, here it is stone imperfect fields.

Yep, this is the one. It’ll break down all of the standard fields. Nadine, take a look at the chat. I’m going to drop this in the chat here for you.

So actually, everybody should be able to see this in just a moment. There is the link to that.

Again, you’re very welcome.

Yeah, and I apologize, a lot of the questions, some of the questions that are getting asked,

it really would be best if you reached out to the Support Department. If you have a particular scenario that you’re dealing with in receipts if you want to know how to batch them or things like

that today we’re just talking about the basics. But there really isn’t one simple answer this would require a dialogue back and forth. Because the answer is, oftentimes it kind of depends, we would need to log into your database and take a look at your particular scenario to see what’s going on there. So if you do have any lingering issues with the receipt process, I would encourage you to go to this little question mark, bubble and go to chat support. We have live representatives that can help you out

with whatever it is that you need, hey,

I want to batch out these receipts. I want to do this with receipts, I want to run this report, whatever the case may be, they’re not gonna be able to actually do the work for you, but they’re gonna be able to give you insights and guidance and steps on whatever it is that you need assistance with.

Laura, you’re welcome. Sorry, sorry, we kind of get to the bottom of it here.

Right, Nadine, you liked it, you’re You’re very welcome. Happy to point you in the direction of that, that’s it’s a good article, you’re never going to need to like have memorize each and every single field in the database. It’s just too much. I don’t even know what all the field names are. But that article, that article does have all them listed.

All right, see?

On the receipt, so what I would still say that you should do it’s getting asked, Hey, if I’m sending out a receipt for every gift as it comes through,

do I still need to send that end of year letter? I’d say yes. still send that end of year letter that includes everything. For all the reasons that that we’ve already listed it is

it would be nice, especially over the course of a year for your donor to have one singular letter or email listing out everything once tax season arrives now. So they’ll have all of it listed out and they won’t have to worry about finding know what did I donate? When did I donate all of that jazz? So the end of your tax letter with everything is still strongly strongly advise.

All rights and give it another minute or so see if there’s any other questions out there.

It’s being asked about the handouts. I, for whatever reason, technical issues, the PDF wasn’t attached. So there wasn’t a handout today, but you should still be getting that in the follow up email.

You’re welcome.

All right. And that looks like everything for now. So this has been great. Thank you, everybody. This has been receiving 101 I have been shown material being joined by the amazing Jonathan. And all of you have been amazing. Thank you, everybody. Take care. Have a great day.