Mail Musings: One Way to Consolidate
A little over a week ago I was at the Charleston Conference speaking with clients in the Customer Support booth. (A little shout out, if you were at the conference and stopped by, it was nice meeting you and getting to know a little more about your organization). One thing I noticed while speaking to clients is there were a lot of questions that focused on one major theme: the Mail module. There were questions on Labels, Envelopes, Donor Acknowledgement Letters, Receipts, etc. So in light of the number of questions about Mail, I decided that my next few posts will focus on mailings.
To get started, I wanted to talk a little about Consolidated Receipts. As we are close to the end of the year, I thought this was a good topic to start with. Consolidated receipts are exactly what they sound like; they combine all of the donor's individual gifts into one receipt. So if a donor gave 5 gifts over the year, instead of getting 5 individual receipts, the donor would receive one receipt with the total gift amount. For donors who don't want to receive individual receipts for each donation (for example, monthly payroll deduction or recurring direct debit or credit card donors), consolidated receipts are a great solution.
The first step is to set up the donor’s record to receive consolidated receipts. To do this, open the donor’s record and go to the Bio2 tab. In the Receipt type field select Consolidated receipts, and save the record. To create and send your donors consolidated receipts, use the following steps:
- Create a query of constituents with a consolidated receipt type.
- Add the desired output fields and check the query results. Save and close the query.
- In Mail, create a new Receipt parameter set.
- On the General tab, select the desired receipt type. If using pre-printed receipts, select Pre-printed receipts. If creating a custom receipt in Microsoft Word, select Create custom data file.
- Select to Include records from the query created in step 1.
- On the Fields to include tab, select the fields that you want included on your receipts.
- Complete the remaining tabs to create the receipts.
The end result is each donor will receive a consolidated receipt that summarizes his giving for the date range for which you ran the mailing. For more information on running consolidated receipts, check out Knowledgebase solution BB29002.
Does your organization use consolidated receipts? If so, do you have any suggestions for your fellow Raiser's Edge users? If you do, please leave a comment on this post.