End of Year: Sending a Tax Email

Thank you for joining me for DonorPerfects us and have your tax email presentation. If you are looking for the steps on how to generate Canadian and have your receipts that can be found in a different video, as well as us and have your tax letters, we also have Read More

Thank you for joining me for DonorPerfects us and have your tax email presentation. If you are looking for the steps on how to generate Canadian and have your receipts that can be found in a different video, as well as us and have your tax letters, we also have a different video for that as well. Hello, my name is Sean Matera, I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. And I’m going to be walking you through the process here today. Before we get started, make sure that you create a backup of your database beforehand. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can contact the support department. You can also contact support if you are not sure how to merge duplicate records. If there’s any duplicate donors in their best case, to merge them before you go through with this process. Something else you’re going to need our year end Calculated Fields, specifically, receipt amounts. If you are taking in kind donations, or utilizing the fair market value field for any of your data entry, you’re going to have to have some of these calculated fields in your system that are going to make sure that all totals are being accurately calculated. For example, in my sample database that I have here, where I have fake donors, fake donations, and fields that are organized in a different way than you’re probably used to. All of this is customizable. But we have a gift screen where we have some familiar elements like Gift Amount, anytime a donation is recorded, you’re going to record that amount in Gift Amount, like you would for most donations. Now if the donor is getting something in return, like perhaps they are buying a ticket for an event and they’re getting something in return meals, freebies etc. You can record how much the donor is getting out of that transaction with the fair market value field. In that scenario, it will take the Gift Amount, subtract to the fair market value to give the receipt amount of $40 what the person can then claim on their taxes. receipt amount would also be important for in kind donations, that in kind donation wouldn’t have a gift amount and a monetary amount would not be put in there but there would still be a fair market value, a declared amount for that good or service that was donated. Now as long as you have the calculated fields in your system receipt amount should be showing the correct amount. It’s possible they may not be in there. To check you can go to settings and calculated fields.

From here, you’re looking for the field to update RCPT underscore mount, there’s three of them, there should also be another one that’s adding up the receipt amount for the previous calendar year. If you are not seeing these in settings and calculated fields, please contact the support department now and they will assist you in adding the this is very important to make sure that your fair market value is going to be adding up correctly so that it goes into the email correctly. If all of that is set up, you can move on to setting up your email template. Just like with our letters, we also start you off with a bunch of these email templates. They can be found at the envelope icon for mailings in the white ribbon at the top. From that drop down select Email Templates. From there, you’re going to want to locate sample email template annual consolidated This is the email template that you can use for the end of your email. After there you can copy it and customize it to make it your own.

There we go here is mailings at the top. And here is email templates. Now, if you’ve never been here before, we are going to have a number of example sample templates for you to use. The one you’re looking for is called sample email template and you will consolidate it for some reason it was deleted again contact support to help you with His creation. There should be one in here for you already. And I’m just going to leave this one as is I’m going to copy from it and make a new one. Right next to the trashcan is the little two pages. You can click on to copy it and then click on Copy. To edit. From here, we can give this template a name. This is going to be an annual consolidated, email consolidated and in that it is one email that has all of the donations on and consolidated into one going to specify the year the email has to have an email address attached to it. Once this shows up in the donors inbox, they’re going to have to be able to respond to it. So you can put an internal email in the forum. While not required, you could also carbon copy or blind copy somebody internally. Not a bad idea, you can certainly always regenerate these. But if you’re blind copy somebody internally, you’ll always have a copy just in case, the donor wants to quickly get another one. We’re also going to need a subject as well. Some stuff will be populated in here for you as an example. But it can be whatever you like. Thank you. Here we go. I can customize this a little bit. As Lashley at the end of the year, we have an opportunity to make this a special message. It goes out only once a year, we could customize this a little bit more with perhaps the donors name. If I wanted a field to go here for let’s say a donors name, like the salutation field, I can click on Insert Merge Field search for my field of interest, in this case, salutation and select it. There we go. No copying and pasting needed. Sometimes these merge fields, they will have percent symbol sometimes they’ll have pound signs. As long as you’re using either of these Insert Merge Field buttons, it’ll work just fine. Down here we have the body of the email. This is what we affectionately call our WYSIWYG editor. What you see is what you get

if you’re used to Microsoft Word, unfortunately, that’ll reset your expectations here just a little bit. We can bold italicized underline, handful of different fonts and color options, alignment paragraph options as well. Of course, really the most of your customization opportunities are going to be done with this little Insert Image button JPEGs or PNG is a click on this little icon. From here, you could click and drag and drop an image here. Clicking this little box though will open up your file explorer, where you can then find and locate an image you want to use. Alternatively, if you’ve used the email templates before, it’s possible that you might have an image already saved that you want to use.

There are already a field in here for salutation, you can edit this to a degree. certainly feel free to make it your own. As far as the message goes, what you have a limited bit of ability to do is edit this little chart right here, very similar to the letter. The end of your email lets you pick up to five different fields, four or five different columns here. So mimicking that end of your letter. Let’s have column one B, date of gift. Let’s have column two prompt two could be anything I want to pick Gift Amount.

Sure, we could put in the funds. We can put in the type of gifts. Let’s put in a check reference number maybe in the last column

You can only have five columns in this little table here. But you could have less if you wanted to. Very similar to Excel, if you click within this little table, it will give you some options for removing columns. Outside of that, really, there’s not much editing that we can or should be doing here. Something else to point out as well. This little table that we’re seeing here is encompassed by these little caret slash symbols, a lot of people will see that can are concerned, they delete it, don’t delete those, if you delete these little carrots, the slashes, it will break the table, the email will not work, I’ll leave those there. When it does merge, they won’t be seen. What will happen though is you will get a running total adds this column will this will tell it that it’s going to be Gift Amount, at cetera, et cetera, we will have a row for each and every gift from last calendar year. Put in your name, contact information signatures, whatever other messaging you want to put into this email to make it your own to thank all of your donors for all of their help and support last year.

Once you are content with your new annual email, and click on Save Template there is no auto saving anywhere. So if you are taking a little bit of time and a little bit of thought into this email as you should certainly make sure that you are periodically clicking on Save Template, it will not automatically save itself. Alright, so now we have our email template ready to go. And to generate this email for last year’s donors, we can go to receipts. Now, our first step here there’s my slide. Our first step here is to check annual consolidated email. As seen in this screenshot here. If you generate receipts on a regular basis, used to seeing email used to seeing letter you may or may not be seeing annual consolidated email as an option. I’ve done this on purpose as is the case here. Annual consolidated email is not an option. If you have it great you can proceed if not, you’ll have to follow the steps I’m about to go through now. To enable the annual consolidated email option within DonorPerfect, you’re going to need to go to settings the gear icon at the top right and then go to parameters. These are your system wide settings. Usually a set it and forget it type thing don’t need to go here very often. But in this case, there’s a setting that needs to be a be enabled for our acknowledgments and receipts. For the end of your US tax email. There’s two checkboxes that we need to have checked here. One activate receiving to activate consolidated receiving not concerned with anything else, just click on Save. There we go our parameters have changed. Anytime parameters change, it will prompt you to log out and then log back in so that your changes will take effect that is always the case. Anytime you make a change in parameters. But now when I go over to receipts, just like magic, we have our annual consolidated email there’s a little question mark bubble here just detailing what its purposes All right, so from here I can show more options. Likely the options that you’re going to need are hiding down here. Click on show more options. Put in your selected date. As of this recording, I am recording this November 18 2023. Whenever you might find yourself following these steps, put in last calendar year, whatever that may be for you. January 1 to just Number 31st. Check include already processed gifts. Also, you’re going to need to check your selection filter. None should be selected, if there is one there, remove it with the blue x. For me, I don’t have a filter, but I’m going to use one, the one that I need is for email is not blank. Very similar to what is done with the letters. For letters, you’re looking for the address to not be blank. In this case, we want the email to not be blank. I’ll select main bio and box one. box two, I’ll select all fields. So I can then select email. And then three, I’ll select that I wanted to be not blank or not no.

And as always, you can check the box to share this across your colleagues.

Then we can go making sure annual consolidated receipt is checked, it will uncheck the other two, we have our dates we’re including already processed. And we’re narrowing it down a little bit just for the folks that have an email. Now next to this checkbox, we have a little gear. What this gear is doing is letting us pick and choose what fields are going into our columns. Let’s get a side by side comparison here. So I can show you what I mean here. Let me go back to mailings and email templates. And let me go back to my brand new, annual consolidated 2023 email. Here’s my gift lists my columns and these columns could have been anything. But I decided date of gift is column one, gift amount is column two, so on so forth. And the same is true here, I will have to select the fields that I want to use. I will select Date of gifts, or gifts underscore date is what we’re looking for gifts underscore dates, we want that in position one. The second field is going to be receipt amounts. Otherwise, you’re going to be just regular amount if you don’t use fair market value. If you do receipt amount, put that in column two. I have GL and column three. That is gL underscore code.

If in your version, you decided to remove one of these columns. You don’t need to put anything in here there is a blank option that you could leave. Something else that I’m going to do as well for a drop down menu like general ledger is display the description. We’re going to do the same thing for gift type, whether it’s cash or cheque credit, that’s a drop down menu, we will display the description there and reference. It’s my very last one. Safe There we go. With all that in place. I can now generate my receipts. Here we go. It’s given me a little preview 298 gifts from 75 donors. If I wanted to see more about those folks, I can click on this blue 75 here or whatever total you’re seeing there on your end and it will show you all the folks that are going to be included there. You can then select your email template. And if ever forget which one you’re working with, you can always preview it from here otherwise, you have to preview you have to preview these results before the email is actually sent just like when you’re doing singular donation receipts for a donation received. Once the email goes out, there is no calling it back If you see a spelling mistake, let’s see, here’s the salutation for the donors if something was misspelled here, regrettably, it’s not going to let us alter it here, we would have to go back to the donors record, make that change there. If there was a spelling mistake in the body of the email, I would have to go back to mailings, email templates, and edit the mistake in the email template that it’s being pulled from. There may be a lot in here, but we do encourage you to just take a few moments to scroll through, double check all of them make sure everything is adding up and merging correctly. Once you’ve confirmed that you can click on next send email receipts, where it will give you a warning that this is irreversible. Once this email goes, it goes and it can’t come back. Send email receipts now and pat yourself on the back friend. You just generated your end of year tax letters or emails I should say. And that’s all there is to it. Thank you for joining me, this has been the US and if your tax email procedures I’ve been Champa Taro, thank you so much. Take care. Have a great day.