The Power of Thank Yous

Good afternoon and welcome. This webinar is the power of thank you and using receipts in DonorPerfect, I want to welcome you here today we’re going to go over the process. Now hopefully you’ve done receiving one on one. That’s the first one, Read More

Good afternoon and welcome. This webinar is the power of thank you and using receipts in DonorPerfect, I want to welcome you here today we’re going to go over the process. Now hopefully you’ve done receiving one on one. That’s the first one, that’s going to give you kind of a baseline of information foundational information. Now we’re going to dive a little more deeply into the receiving process. My name is Donna Mitchell. Good afternoon, and welcome. So happy to have you here. And we’re going to really learn some cool things today. So let’s jump in with our housekeeping items. And then we’ll start the training. All right, let’s see what we’re going to be doing today. So according to DonorPerfect data, and this is, this is our clients, the donor retention rate for donors who are thanked, the same day, their gift is received at the nonprofit is 60.90%. The national average is about 43%. So think about that. The simple task of getting a thank you out the same day is going to hopefully up your donor retention to 60.90%. That is really amazing. To me, this is something that you have control over. So we’re going to go over that Good afternoon, Audrey. So we’re going to go and talk about the tools and things that are available to you in DonorPerfect, so that you can acknowledge your donors swiftly and well. So here’s what we’re going to be doing today, we’re going to help you understand some of the key fields that need to be populated. In order to facilitate and expedite the receiving process, we’re going to create the thank you experience, we’ll show you how to set yourself up for success, and include any other tips that you might want to consider in there. We’re stepping through the actual receipts process, we’re going to show you how to send a thank you from the gift screen itself. And we’re going to also talk about how to add additional fields to your mail merge letter templates. And there are some re options, some things you can do to redo things in the receiving process. Now the contents of this webinar may contain features and fields that are different than your own. If you have a question, please again, feel free to ask.

Or Wow. So listen to this. In January, this is this is somebody that’s on the line with us right now. In January, they made a first time get a first time gift to a small local nonprofit. And she says I have yet to be thanked, but my credit card was charged. I won’t give again. And how difficult could it have been to even send an email? Thank you something. So I think Jessica, you are totally understanding what we’re going to talk about today. And I agree with you, it’s it’s as easy as it can be. I don’t see why people aren’t thanking donors in a timely fashion. All right, so let’s take a look, we’re going to talk about some key fields. And this is really going to help you understand how to be able to thank your donors based on their needs. The first field that we’re looking at is this thank you Template field, this is on the gift screen. So this is a drop down coded field that contains the codes for the different types of mail merge templates that you have uploaded into the system. This code is going to help you when you go to do batch receiving. So imagine that you’re thanking 50 gifts, right? 50 different donors, you’re gonna be able to have a thank you code for each type of reason, right? It could be for your appeal. Right? So it could be the end of your thank you. It could be according to your general ledger, it could be the type of gift or soft credit Thank you. It could be according to your campaign, maybe even telling people Oh, thank you for buying your tickets, right to an event. So these fields these Thank you codes can match. Whatever type of Thank you are where you want to thank your donors. And I also love that first time thank you that Jessica was talking about why not have a new donor thank you letter, what you say to a new donor is going to be totally different than what you say to a major donor right and so on. The other field that is important is this field called the receipt delivery preference. Now this field tells us how the donor wants to be acknowledged. When we go went to DonorPerfect. You’ll see this is again, another drop down coded field. But depending on what is listed here, that’s how we’re going to be able to acknowledge the donor. If we’re doing batch, receding, everybody getting an email, of course, they’re going to be grouped together, and then grouped by the thank you letter type. If you’re doing letters, you’re going to be able to do those groups of letters, but they’re going to be categorized by the thank you letter type as well. So these two things are very important when we’re going to thank our donors. So let’s talk about creating the thank you experience. What message do you have the message right? Your thank you letters obviously can serve multiple purposes, obviously. The first is to thank someone, right? Thank them for their gift for their support. What do you want to share with the donor? Do you want to share their the impact of their gift? Do you want to share what past giving has helped you do? Do you want to share with them what you’re planning to do? So consider those types of things? What kind of message do you want to share in your Thank you. The delivery method is going to be email or letter, you’re going to be able to find out what your donors want. And you’ll be able to mark their records in such a way that they’ll get the exact email or letter, whichever they prefer. Now, we do have email templates that you’re going to be able to design these email templates. If you look over here, we’re going to do this in in a demo. But just notice this field here, if I know you probably can’t see it really well. But basically, your email templates are going to be associated to those thank you letter codes on your gift screen. So when you say okay, this is the annual appeal, email, thank you. That’s exactly what this person would get. Letter templates are going to allow you to customize these templates, personalize them. Keeping in mind that any fields on the gift screen, or that main screen that are populated, are eligible to go into your mail merge templates, we’re going to show you a little bit later how to add fields on the fly. And then you can always add a personal touch. That’s one of the things that I really love about having the different thank you letter codes, because you’re going to be able to add that personal touch, even just adding the fields into what their gift was used for, or whatever that might look like, you can do that by adding those fields and putting that information in. So we’re going to talk about setting up email templates. But before we jump into there, I want to go into DonorPerfect. There at har there it is, okay, that’s a joke that I do. Sorry, I don’t really speak poor English. Unless I’m really trying to. Okay, so we’re in DonorPerfect. And I’m just going to jump to a donor record. And we’re going to go to the gift screen. And we’re going to click on this pencil here, we’re just going to take a look at an existing gift. And what you’ll notice in the gift, we have all of our information, right? The solicitation pause for the cause the campaign, the general ledger, and all of that. But we also notice this thank you letter template. So the thank you letter template, again, is a drop down coded field that contains all the different codes, we have a gala, thank you. And then kind Thank you, a major donor, thank you, right standard attribute, thank you, and so on. So you can have thank you letter templates as diverse and various as the types of gifts you receive and the reasons why you get them. All right. Each of these codes needs to have a matching Mail Merge letter template uploaded into DonorPerfect if you’re going to be doing letters, and we need to set up an an import, I’m sorry, an email template to match the so if someone chooses email, they’re going to get it the actual correct email. So let’s talk about setting up your templates, your email templates, you’re going to go to mailings and email templates. Now, when you get there, those email templates are strictly for receding. They are not mass emails, like you would do in constant contact. The first thing we want to do when we’re going to edit our template is associate the thank you template code. Okay. You are able to include DonorPerfect field as merge fields in your email again, to personalize it based on that person’s gift. And then you can add a personal message, your logo, electronic signature, all those cool things So you’ll be able to do that your letter templates are going to be done in Word, okay, you’re going to go to settings and mail merge templates. Now we have existing templates in there that you’re welcome to download, you can copy and paste the fields into your templates. And then you’re going to upload your templates back into DonorPerfect. Once again, we’re going to be able to include DonorPerfect fields. And you can add a personal message, logo, signature, all that good stuff in there. So let’s jump into Donna perfect. And I’m going to kind of take this full circle. All right, so we’re going to the first thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to add a new code. So when you’re adding codes to DonorPerfect, if you have that privilege, you can do it on the screen itself, whatever screen you’re on, you can add that code, or you can go to settings in the top right corner and code maintenance. And that will allow you to access all the codes in the system, I’m going to click on the plus sign. And I’m going to create a new code. So this is going to be my thank you with c y t d.

Total. So what this is, I’m saying that’s a thank you with the calendar year to date total. And I’m just going to be able to use this. So I can show people what their calendar year to date gift total is when they make that gift. All right. So I’m just gonna say this, we’re going to take it back to the standard, I don’t want to mess up this. So we’re just going to save that. And now we have our code. Okay, the other thing we need to do is we need to do our mail merge template, we’re going to do the letter second, let’s do the email. First, I’m going to go to mailings in the menu ribbon, and email templates. So this is going to be the list, you’re going to see a few samples in here. And you’ll see some of them have a little PDF icon. Whenever you see that that means that there is also a PDF document attached, that can be used as an actual receipt. So your email body can be the thank you the message, the video, all the love. And then the PDF attachment can be the business side, right, the tax information, and all that good stuff. So you have that option. You’re going to have several samples in the system. And you’ll see created by the system, what we recommend is copying them. So I’m going to copy this standard, thank you. And I’m going to copy and edit it. And then it comes in here. So let’s take a look first at what it looks like. So it’s going to pull in all this information for me. It’s pulling in my general ledger code. If I want to change it i i certainly can. And then the PDF attachment is a receipt that includes more information here at the bottom. So we’re just going to use this for today. Now the most important thing to remember is when you’re doing this, we’re going to call this thank you we’ll see YTD total, what is the YTD mean calendar year to date totals. So in DonorPerfect, you have these calculated fields that calculate your donors, fiscal and calendar year to date totals for the current year back through six years ago. The idea of this is that we’re going to not only thank them for the gift, but include the fact that this is what their calendar year to date total is of giving to this organization. Okay. If you don’t have a template made by the system, I don’t know you might have an older system, I would just reach out to support but what you can do, because we don’t we have letter templates, you could always just create a new template and start from scratch but if you need help, you can reach out to support okay all right. So there’s my name now what do I have to do here? This is the most important thing we need to make sure that it is associated with the proper thank you letter code. So I’m going to click on this drop down there’s my gala Thank you nope don’t want that. Is my income unkind Thank you don’t want that. I want this thank you with calendar year to date total. Okay, so that’s the one I’m going to use. You’re going to put your from address in there you can also add a CC and BCC. You will see in the subject line which is also required. We have the first name field so dear Donna Dear Michael Dear Bob But I want the salutation field because what if this is coming from John and Marjorie. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to get rid of this field, this is a merge field. I’m going to leave my cursor there. And right at the end of this subject line, you’re going to see a button that says Insert Merge Field. So I’m going to click on that. And when I do, it’s going to give me a list of fields that are available. Any fields from the main screen or the bio screen, or the gift screen are available to me. All I’m going to do is click in the field and type in Sal. And there’s my salutation field. So if I click that, it now puts the salutation there. So now it would read Dear John and Marjorie, Dear Bob, and Sue and whatever. Okay. QUESTION And I see, our fiscal year is different from our calendar year. Can we have a thank you note with the fiscal year to date total? You sure can. But you always want to remember that the donors fiscal year is the calendar year. So if your fiscal year is July to June, you’re welcome to create one with their fiscal year to date total. But that is not something that may be helpful to them for your end of year. Just just saying, okay, just wanted to put that out there. But absolutely, you can. Sure. Alright, so we added our salutation. And now we have the body of our message. Now there’s my GL Code. But what if I wanted to put in the salutation code, I’m going to take this out. Again, I’m just going to, it’s from percent sign to percent sign and take it out. And we have an Insert Merge Field here. So I’m going to click on Insert Merge Field, and I want the solicitation. And there’s my solicitation code, description. And there it is, let’s bold it as well. And just think of how much you can do with that. Alright, so let’s gonna pull that in. And again, we have our PDF with this information. And same thing, don’t worry about it. This is just a sample. All right. And there we go. So now we’re going to go save it. Okay, so it saved and ready to go. If I go back out to my template list, I’m going to see our new that. There it is. Alright, so we’ll show you how that works. Let’s now go into settings, and mail merge templates. So your mail merge templates are the actual letters that are going to be going out. So if you’re doing letters, this is what you’re going to want to do. When you go into your system. If you have a more updated system, you should see some samples in here. It would say something like letter underscore Thank you, underscore, General. And you’ll also see how it was put in system, right. So you probably have a letter thank you letter underscore thank underscore you, you’ll probably have that. If you don’t have that. Never fear, because you can scroll to the bottom of the screen. Click on looking for pre made templates. And this was covered in receding 101. And this will take you to the DonorPerfect knowledge base, and allow you to access all of the mail merge templates that we have for you. So you’ll see here you have envelopes, all different types of letters, both thank you and appeal letters, pledge letters, and labels. So you’re welcome to download any of those and update them. And that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go in and update that. So let me pull down. Let’s download this one.

All right, hold on. I’m bringing that over so you can see it. Alright, so here is just a sample. Now, you’ll notice that there are merge fields in here. There’s the gift date. There’s the gift amount, and all of that. If you want to add anything to it, you certainly can, and you’re welcome to do that. All right. I’m going to show you later how to add a field in because we’re going to do that thank you letter a little bit later. Okay. All right. So we have that. And I’m going to just show you that and then we’re going to be able to go in and update this hold on one Second. We’re going to upload that later because I want to show you how to do the field. Oh, and the other thing I didn’t do hold on one second, because we have that email with the calendar year to date field, but we don’t have the field in there. So let me go do that. I’m going to go to mailings and email templates. I’m going to edit this one. I’m going to go to the PDF attachment and I’m gonna do something like this. You’re just gonna put it in 2023 books, not their 2023 calendar. Gift kept total to date. We’ll put $1 sign in there. I’m going to bold this.

And then I’m going to put my calendar to date field in there. Alright, calendar. There it is. There we go. All right. Good to go. All right, let’s say that.

And now we’re good to go. All righty. So let’s get back to our presentation. And we’ll give you some more tips. Okay. Alright, so personalizing your letter. You need to personalize your letter. It’s important. The more that you personalize it, the more people will respond to it. Well, it’ll resonate with them. But here’s the thing. And I told this little secret yesterday. Everybody knows you’re using templates. Now, I will tell you there are some organizations that still are doing, you know, handwritten cards and notes. And I think that is absolutely amazing. And kudos to you for being able to do that. A lot of organizations don’t either don’t have the bandwidth, the people the time to do that. So we’re trying to, to get you to thank your donors, but do it in a way that’s going to be much more efficient. That doesn’t mean you can’t personalize it, you can pull in fields from the gift, you can pull in fields from the main bio, and personalize that email or letter. This is a chart that we’re looking at. That shows the donor retention rate and how it fluctuates based on when the donors thanked. So this is from our data. This is from our clients, we pull this information. Donors that were thanked the same day we mentioned this earlier. 60.90% is the donor retention rate that is incredible. Receiving it the next day 52.7 drops down to 52.7. Funnily enough, the set two days later, it jumps back up to 55%. And as the days go on, you see that it drops, it starts to drop. Now, I think a lot of people would love a 52% retention rate. But wouldn’t you love a 60%? Almost 61% rate. And we already know, Jessica’s like I’m not in for you don’t give me a thank you letter, you don’t get another gift. And I hear that I think that is really it tells a lot It tells the story. Now your thank you message should be about the donor, how do they help you? Your gift, your support helped us do this, that and the other? You are Rockstar, right? They want to hear this. Now most people say oh no, no, they do. They want to hear it. They want to hear how wonderful they are and what their money is doing. Because guess what, we all work hard for our money, right? And so when we’re giving it not only do we want to be banked, but we really want to know how that money is going to be used. So it’s the same for your donors to assure the donor that the gift was set to work as intended. If the donor says this has to go to your endowment fund or their capital campaign, you can use those merge fields in your letters. Thank you so much for your generous support to our 2023 capital campaign. This is how we use it and that’s exactly what you can do. And you don’t have to get in there and type all this stuff. It’s in the record. You’re going to merge it into your letters. Be creative. You can also use video or phone calls to say thank you. That first time donor Jessica if you If it were me, I would have been on that horn calling you up and thanking you for that first gift. And if I couldn’t thank you, because a lot of people aren’t going to answer their phones. What about an email message? What? Somebody, somebody did that to me, I gave a small gift. And I got an email with a video in it. And it said, Donna, thank you. And I couldn’t believe it. Well, I was hooked. It works. I am, but I am a sustaining donor. Right? So it’s really does make a difference. So let’s talk about some useful settings and DonorPerfect. And then we’re going to jump into actually doing some fun stuff here. I do have a question before we move on, if we can personalize our email letters, receipts here, what is the reason we use Constant Contact for other communications? The reason is that the email is just for receiving when you go and you see that email templates that we’re talking about. And the letters that we’re talking about. This is strictly about receding. So the email templates that we just saw, are not available anywhere else, you’re going to use Constant Contact for your general email campaigns, appeals updates, you know, that kind of thing. It’s totally different. No, the emails that are customized here are strictly for receiving. Okay. Thank you for that question. All right. Alright. So there are some settings in DonorPerfect, that are going to provide different benefits. So first, the activate receding, this is all under Settings, parameters, and not receipts and acknowledgments. So when you activate receiving this enables the option to populate receipt fields during the receipt process or from a single gift. So some of you I would imagine most of you don’t have that setup, the receipt fields would show you things like receipt numbers, if you chose to, to use receipt numbers, it would put in receipt dates and things like that. If you’re if you don’t have them showing it’s no problem. If you do that data is there for you. Include pledges and receipts and include soft credits in receipt process. If you enable these two options, and someone gives an initial pledge, or someone is getting a soft credit, you’re going to be able to acknowledge those donors. In the receiving process. It’s a really nice feature. Just to, again, somebody does a pledge, you want to thank them for their their pledge. And if somebody does a soft credit, you want to thank them for being instrumental in getting a gift from someone else. Create a contact record for receipt sent. I think this should just be set by default. What this will do if this is checked, it’s going to create a transaction record in the donors record under the contact screen to indicate that a contact record I’m sorry that it was a receipt was sent, regardless of whether it was email or letter. The default received delivery preference that we talked about whether they’re getting a letter or an email, or whatever this is defined here. And the default here is what is going to be on each record when it’s created. If you change the default, you’re welcome to do that. But it will only affect subsequently created records. Okay, so let’s jump into DonorPerfect and take a look at those. So I’m going to save my template, I’m going to go to settings and parameters. So I invite you to check out parameters anyway, because there are a lot of different things you can do here to help to help you define how DonorPerfect is going to behave for you. I’m going to go into acknowledgments and receipts. And here are the options. So you’ll notice that it gives you the the gift ID for the last batch and the number, the current batch number. This is the activate receding option. Now in the US the only time you’re really going to choose this is at the end of the year when you want to activate consolidated receiving this consolidated receiving and activate receiving is already selected by default for our Canadian clients. That’s what they have to do. If you want to show those receipt fields again, you’re welcome to display them include pledges and receipt processing and include soft credits again, if a donor makes a pledge or a soft credit, they would be able to be acknowledged Through the receiving process, and then create a contact record for receipt sent. This is really cool because this is what’s going to allow for your donors for a contact record to be created, so that you can keep track of those receipts that had been sent. You’ll also note, this default receipt delivery preference, the default out of the box is letter. So your records, most of them probably already have letter. If you change the default, again, it will only affect newly created records after you’ve changed it. If you need to change the others, you’d have to do a global update or manually update those. Okay, so that’s my default preference. And if I go to a donor record again, I’m just going to show you this, you would save that after you do that.

I want to show you something here. You’ll notice that the receipt delivery preference is defined here on the main screen. That’s right, because this is a contact preference. Whatever is selected here is what will default to the gift screen. So if it says letter here and I create a new gift, the receipt delivery preference on the gift is going to be letter, I can change it per gift. But if I want to change this for everything, I want to do email and letter. Just to show you how this works. Then every time I create a new gift, the receipt delivery preference, we’ll pull in that default. And it is now email and letter. Okay, so we’re gonna come back here and add a gift and a little bit. If you have questions, please feel free to jump in and add your questions. I’m happy to answer. All right, so let’s talk about receipt and we’re going to go over the process, I’m going to show you how it works. So here we have our receipts, you’re going to go to receipts on the menu ribbon. Remember, this is batch receding. So if you have a bunch of gifts, you’re going to be able to acknowledge them in one receipt setting setting. And you’ll be able to see the segmentation because you’ve created it on the gift. So we click on receipts. The next option is to select your receipt filter options. This there are some options there that are selected by default, we’ll go over that with you. And then of course, you can add a filter if you just want to see certain gifts, whatever the case might be. Once you’ve made that decision, you’re going to review the batch report. This is a great place for you to review what you’re about to acknowledge. And there’s an option to mail merge your labels or envelopes from there. Your email receipts once you look at your batch, once you look at your batch report and come back and click on Generate receipts, you’re then going to be able to acknowledge your emails first, you’ll see email and letter up here. So it stopped at the emails first, then it goes to the letters. And then you’re going to update the batch. That’s how the process works. Okay, so what we’re going to do, I’m going to add a gift. And I’m just going to do a regular gift, I’m not going to get all fancy shmancy. So we’re going to add in our gift, we have a new gift, this is going to be four $50. It’s going to be the cheque, General Ledger. We’ll do the annual campaign. And we’re going to do our annual appeal. Thank you. No big what we’re going to use that and Don is going to get an email a letter or both. Okay. Now, I can thank from the screen. We’re not going to do that right now. We’re going to do that after the fact. So she’s going to get this annual appeal. Thank you. Let’s save that. No, I don’t want to apply this to a pledge and I’m going to go find another record. Let’s look at Barbara we’re going to add a new gift for Barbara let’s add a new gift and we’re going to make this for $75. And this is going to be credit card building fund. We’ll call this

um I thought I created that code. Oh, this is the solicitation I’m sorry. I’m like wait a minute. I so we’re gonna do Wolfson whiskers, and we’re gonna call this standard. Thank you. That’s perfectly fine. All right. And she’s getting just a letter. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right, so we have these two gifts. And now assuming that you had a bunch, we’re going to be going to do batch receding. And Jessica, I see your question. I’ll be right there. All right. So what we’re going to do is go to receipts. And now right now, we’re just using existing stuff. Now, here are my receipt, filter options. The these are the ones things that are set by default email letter, or both. So anybody getting an email, a letter, or both would be processed in this batch. The next default is the transaction type, it defaults to all transactions, that means any gift entered by any user, okay? If I choose to just do the transactions that I the user, signed in user entered, I would use that, okay. The third default is current batch, batch number equals zero, every new gift entered into DonorPerfect gets a temporary batch number of zero. At the end, if you remember from the slide, we’re going to update the batch number. And that’s going to update the batch number from zero to whatever the new number is for all the gifts in that batch. Okay. So here we go. I’m going to review my batch report, right. So I have everything that I want, I want extra I want user transactions today. Okay, I’m going to review my batch report, I should see two gifts, and there they are. And this batch report, again, is really cool, because it’s going to allow you to see what you’re about to acknowledge, if you made a mistake, if a codes not filled in or something, you can go right back to the gift and fix it. And you can also do your envelopes and labels from here if you want to. Once you’ve reviewed your batch report, you’re going to click the back button on your browser. And you’re going to scroll down. Now before we click on Generate receipts, which is where we’re going to go, you’re going to see the current batch number is 39. That means when I update the, the gifts in this batch, they’re all going to get a new batch number of 39. Okay, I’m going to click on Generate receipts. And you’ll see I have one person getting my annual appeal. Thank you. So because that email was associated with the annual appeal, thank you letter. That’s the one that comes up. I’m going to select it and it could be a bunch. So we would select all. And now we’re going to preview our email receipts. This gives me an opportunity. So there’s the salutation Donna, do Donna. Here’s the gift, amount, gift, date, and so on. And then here’s their receipt part. Okay, we would go ahead and send that. Off it goes. And now I’m here with the letters. So now you see why we create those codes. To segment those thank you letters because everyone getting the annual appeal. Thank you. They’ll be grouped together. Standard, thank you, they’ll be grouped together major donor, thank you, they’ll be grouped together. So you don’t have to worry now, who’s going to get which letter. Right? It’s already here for us. That’s why we do it. So let’s go ahead and merge into an existing template. I’m going to keep that radio button selected, click on instant merge. This is going to open up and allow me to select my letters. Alright, so I’m going to do this. Let’s just pretend that says annual appeal. Good that one’s done. There’s my standard. I’m going to click on instant merge, find my standard thank you and pull the data from DonorPerfect and merge. So it literally merges all that data in and then once I review my my letters, I’m going to go ahead and update the batch number. I’m just going to do it now. So you can see how that works. So now we’ve updated the batch, the new batch number for the next batch of gifts will be 40. And if I take a look at my ladders, I can see that it pulled in all the data that I asked for. So there is all the donor information gift date and amount. These are just additional merge fields to demonstrate what you can do to to really personalize those letters and your emails as well. And this is the coral acres standard. Thank you. Okay, and it shows the receipt details so you can make this as fabulous as you want One All right. Question, can I automate this so that when a gift comes in a thank you note receipt automatically goes out via email, or batched for printing? Jessica, the answer is no. Not in DonorPerfect. So if you are adding gifts manually or importing them or doing batches, receding is a user initiated function. However, if you’re using your DEP online forms, any of the forms, then you would be able, that automatically sends an email, thank you and receipt when the donor completes their transaction successfully. So in the system, no, it’s all user initiated. Okay. All right. So let’s take a look at the next thing. And then we’re going to show you how to add fields. So the thank you from the gift record, you can thank your donors from your gift record. If you have gifts that are kind of trickling in, right, we don’t want to wait till the end of the week. To do these gifts, I want to do them right there on the fly. So the cool thing is it still uses those templates. But we’re going to use this thank you letter field here to send an email and or a letter right from the gift record. And when we do it, it’s going to create the thank you date. it’ll populate that for us. And it will also create a contact record. So let’s jump back into DonorPerfect. And I’m going to show you, first of all, what happened to Donna’s record.

Excuse me. So if we go to Donna’s gift record, here’s the gift that we added. Let’s take a look at it and see what happened.

So the receipt date. Which I’m sure it’s somewhere. Here’s the thank you date, why didn’t that populate? This should have populated and then here is the batch number. So we did update the batch number why that thank you date didn’t come in, I don’t know. But it should have and then it will also create a contact record to indicate that the letter received was sent. So there we go. Okay. So that’s those are the settings that we talked about in the beginning. Now we’re going to go in, and bear with me one second. And thank from the donor record. So let’s say this does happen, right, Donna, we, I found her I don’t know what’s going on there. So I’m gonna go into the gift, I’ve entered the gift, right. And I want to get this out really, really, really fast. All I need to do is go right to the thank donor, select Email or ladder, whichever I want. I’m going to do a ladder. It’s going to allow me to merge this into the letter. But let me show you the email. So I’m going to go back to thank donor, send an email. It’s going to open up and again, it’s going to show me the associated email template. And I click on Send Email. And off it goes. Okay, so we’ll save that. I don’t know why that thank you date is not populating. Hmm, interesting. But you’ll also notice that I do still get a contact record that did not do it. Mm hmm. That’s a ticket. I gotta call that in. Thank you date. All righty. All right. So it would create the contact record, it would also fill in the thank you date. That’s what it would do. Okay. Let me just see if I do it with a letter. I just want to do this one more time. While we’re here. I do a letter from the screen is it going to populate that thank you date. So thank you, donor thank donor send a letter, grab the ladder and merge.

It did it for the letter. So you’ll see now it does put the data in for the letter. And it could be that my email was undeliverable or something, but I’m pretty sure that that has something to do with that. This is what would happen it would fill in that thank you date. Okay. So that’s how we thank from the gift record. Now we have a few minutes left, we’re gonna go over adding additional fields. There’s two ways. There’s one way which is a little bit of the harder way but it’s the old school Ain’t nothing wrong with old school. And then there’s the newer way. So what we want to do is if I want to include additional fields, or add mail merge fields to my letter, the one thing I can do is add the fields via an export template, which we need to do regardless. Okay, you’re gonna go to settings and export templates. But when you go to do you do your receding, you’re going to export clicking on that generate letter receipts. And what that does is it creates the data file, so that you can use it in Emerg, in Word, and then you’re going to do just that. Okay, so that’s number one. Let’s show you how to do that. So I’m going to go to settings and export templates. Now you have a default receiving template in your system, you should, again, if you’re an older client, you may not have it. This is part of the newer sis Gen, I’m going to edit this default receiving template. And remember, your receiving template can include fields from both main bio and gift pledge. Right? So I want to add this calendar year to date field. And it’s actually already there. Okay, if I need a field, I’m just going to put year or try to spell year. There we go. You can just add fields, but you’ll see the calendar year to date field is already there. And the field name is C YTD that’s always what you want to keep in mind. And we’ll talk about that in just a moment. All right, so we’ll have that C YTD field. So we’re golden there. What happens if I want to want to go in here. And I want to add, me take this off. I want to just show you really quickly how this works. So I’m just going to do anybody doing a letter, I’m going to take the email off, and we’re going to generate receipts. Fantastic. So I do have six people getting this annual appeal. Thank you. What I’m going to do this time, instead of doing the instant merge, I’m going to click on Generate letter receipts top or bottom. And what this is going to do is it’s going to export the data for those donors. And it’s going to have those fields in it that I asked for. Right. Okay, so you’ll see all the way at the end. We have that Cy TD field. There it is. All right. Okay, so that’s number one. Let’s close this, too, so we don’t have any mishaps. And now I’m going to go into Word. So I have a thank you letter document that I’ve been working on.

And I’m just gonna remove Remove, remove the major here it is. So what I’m going to do is I’m opening this ladder and it wants to do the merge. So I’m going to find my data source. I’m going to go grab that download. This is the hard way. I’m going to tell you that right now. All right, so there’s my data source. I’m going to click on Open

let me do it the way I want to do it. Okay, let me do it the way I want to do it. When I open up

my letter. It’s this one. I’m just gonna say no right now. So what if down here at the bottom, I want their 2023 gift total. I want that see YTD field there. All I need to do is go in and start mailings and start the mail merge. I want to do letters and I want to start my recipients. I’m using an existing list. I’m going to go and get that download

Okay, and my cursor is right next to the dollar sign. What I want to do is insert a merge field and the field that I want is that see YTD field? That is how you get a merge field using the document. Okay. You would upload this and then you could merge it into donut perfect. The other way we can do this. It’s really cool. So let’s say I take this field, the reference field, I’m going to copy this right copy and when you paste it, you don’t you want to paste it without losing the format same, so just paste it. When you right click on it, you’re going to see a drop down menu that says edit field. When you do that, make sure you know the field name. Remember, ours was Cy, TD, and then we click on. Ok. And again, we get the field. So you can do it the old way old school way. Again, nothing wrong with old school, that always works. And that’s going to allow you to insert the merge field from your document. Or you can copy fields, make note of the field name and edit it right there in the document itself. So now when I save this, and upload it into donor, perfect settings, Mail Merge templates. I’m going to upload new we’re going to browse our computer. And I’m going to go get our document

there it is, and open. Okay, this is going to be gift pledge, right? And we upload. Now, if I go back to Donna’s record, actually, let’s go to receipts. And I’m going to do all transactions, generate receipts. If

so you can skip the emails, I’m just going to grab one don’t really need it to be fabulous. Let’s do the standard. Thank you. I’m going to do my instant merge. And when I’m merge it into my new document, use the data from DonorPerfect and merge. And now

we have a letter with that calendar year to date field in there. Okay, make it easier for you to read. Okay, there it is. There’s your calendar year to date total. Okay.

And there you go. So that is how you are able to do that. Let’s get back to our presentation. See, there we go. Okay, so the option two is what we just did, you just need to make note of the field name. And that’s what you’re going to add and you’re going to edit it in Word. Some redo options, so you can reissue receipts for donors, if they call in they need it. You can do that from within the gift record using that thank donor option. This is going to be used if a donor asked for a second receipt, reprocess this is found within the gift record. If you use this, you’re using this because you need the gift. The gift needs to be corrected and treated as a new gift. regenerate. This allows you to re see that batch or read receipt that allows you to regenerate that batch. So you can rerun it. Let’s say for example, you go to do the batch and oh man, the jet the printer jammed, I gotta go in and redo those. That’s when you would do a regenerate. I’ll show you how to use that. And then reassign allows you to reassign a gift to another donor. So let’s do these. So the I’m going to do this in Donna’s record because we have the batch number in there and everything. So we already saw how to reissue you just click one thing donor and send the letter or the email, that’s three, that’s the reissue, reprocess the gift, what it’s going to do is it’s going to strip it of its batch number. And the thank you date and put a note in the narrative. So I’m going to reprocess this, you’ll see the note that will be added. It’s gonna strip it of its batch number. Oh, thank you, Jessica. I’m sorry, you have to go. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for all your great questions. Have a great afternoon. So now you see it is stripped of its batch number and thank you date. So if I needed to adjust this now I can redo it and then I can go ahead and re receipt that donor, okay. The other was regenerate. So this is a really cool secret to know can put this in your bag of tricks. Once you click instant merge or generate letter receipts. It automatically does those the it’ll mark the record as acknowledged. It will create the contact record, right. So if I need to redo a batch because the printer And what I have to do, I’m going to switch this right back. So I want to do mine. Again, there’s my user transactions today. I’m going to take the current batch off of there. But what I want to do is click on include already processed gifts. So once you click that instant merge or generate receipts, that’s what tells DonorPerfect up, this gift has been acknowledged. If I need to retrieve that list, I need to click Include already processed gifts. I then print to screen and there are my two gifts back. And now I can go ahead and proceed with the hopefully the final printing. The next one is and I just have to remember. The next one is we did reprocess we did all of those reassigned. So what happens if you have to put a gift on another donors record? So let’s say poor Barbara, I’m going to do it to Barbara. We’re going to go into her gift. And oops, that gift should have gone on down his record. So I’m going to edit the gift. And then you’re going to see the option in the blue ribbon that says re assign gift. When I do this, it’s going to allow me to find the donor. All caps data data, and we’re going to select that person. And you’ll see here, it’s going to tell you hey, it’s going to take it from Barbara and put it on the reassigned record here, we click on reassigned gift, it updates her information. There’s Donna, right, so there’s my latest gift. And Barbara now the gift is no longer there. If you want to go back to the previous donors gifts to look at that record, now you’ll see she’s still now listed as lapsed.

Alright, so let’s recap. And then we’ll be ready to go. I only have a couple more minutes. Don’t worry, I’m not going to keep you long. And then we’re going to open the floor for questions. So the power of a well crafted thank you is in your hands. And this is something that you can manage that you can do that will get your donors to come back. You can add personal touches in the message by using merge fields to indicate what they’ve given to, and all of that, you can record the email or the letter that was sent. You can check out the DonorPerfect community for fundraising resource library for template kits. And then you also want to check out the AFP Association for Fundraising Professionals website for resources about thank you messages. And also don’t be afraid to share your message, tell them something, you know, that is going to inspire them to give and understand how their money was spent. Questions you guys asked excellent questions along the way. So if you have questions, please put them in the chat. I’m happy to answer for you. And while we’re waiting for that, I want to thank you so very much for all that you do to make this world a better place. It is just amazing that we are able to help all of you do the amazing work that you do each and every day. So we thank you, I thank you and we appreciate your business and your trust in us to help you move your mission forward. I hope you all have a great rest of the week. I hope to see you tomorrow in the two webinars tomorrow. It would be great to see you there. But please know you can always reach out to support and I hope to meet you again in some other way. Take a take time to review this. Get your breath and get in there and do it. You’ve got the power. Take care, folks. We’ll see you again soon. Bye. Bye. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Nadine. Any other questions? I appreciate your comments too. Thank you so much.

All right. Well, thanks so much. Take care folks. Bye bye.