How do you link a contact (individual relationship to a company) to a particular gift.  For example, we have a company donor with multiple office locations and contacts.  I can designate contacts as a type, but I can't differentiate between the gift and which contact gets the acknowledgement letter.  Currently, an acknowledgment letter will print for several contacts for one gift, and I have to manually delete the wrong the contacts.  We try to not to duplicate the company constituent, so that, for example, the Wal-Mart Foundation doesn't print multiple times on our donors report.  Any suggestions are welcomed. Thanks.  Dana Brown, Clayton State University Foundation, Morrow, Georgia.

For us, The acknowledgement goes to the office that wrote the check - regardless of if there is a local branch with a different address & contact. You may want to look at the Parent Company functionality or at how you are using Contact Types and relationships.

All Annual Statements and Acknowledgement letters go to the Primary Contact at an organization for us and the solicitations and personalized thank you's (no meantion of dollar amounts, etc.) from volunteers and staff that may have been involved in a solicitation go the the contact actually solicted. We manage that by using contact types.

Example: Golf Contact, Gala Contact, etc. I use conditional mail merges based on contact types so if you are doing a Golf Solicitation and the organization is a small one that doesn't have different contacts for things it will end up being sent to the Primary Contact Type as the catch all after looking for a Golf Contact.

I am also worried that you are printing out multiple acknowledgment s for a single gift, that practice could get your organization in huge trouble during an audit. 1 Gift = 1 IRS acknowledgement/receipt. Is there a reason you are processing multiple acknowledgements for one gift?

We have one "Main" contact at each corporation/foundation/organization to whom we mail acknowledgements --- no matter what the reason for the gift.  Then we CC any other contact that might have been involved.  As we are a smallish college with limited donors we are able to adjust the acknowlegdement letters as needed. 

Thanks Laurel and Nina.  I will take your suggestions into consideration. 

Assuming that you are running your acknowledgements using RE: Mail, you could add a contact attribute to the contact's record. Then mark the Org Address tab as 'Mail to contacts" & only send to contacts that have an attribute.

Thanks Tracie.  I currently use contact types in the acknowledgment letters in Mail.  I don't think I was clear in my original post.  Under the umbrella of the Wal-Mart Foundation, we have local representatives at two distribution centers who lay all the ground work for our gifts.  We also have a local Wal-Mart store manager, whose store donates items and sponsors events for us.  I am trying to clean up the duplicates in our database--currently, we have five Wal-Mart records. We have these duplicates because it's easier to send the correct acknowledgment letter to the correct contact.  All of the checks come from Bentonville, AR.  In my attempt to establish solidarity, I added all of the gift contacts to that main record, but when I print acknowledgment letters, all of the contacts, who are gift contacts, get a letter printed; however, I don't mail it to all of them.  I toss the extras. 

Currently, RE can link gifts to events and proposals, but not relationships.I am going to contact Blackbaud to see if this is a possible option for a future update.  I like having all of the gifts posted to the main Wal-Mart record, because it eliminates the need to add up all of the gifts from the individual records in order to place Wal-Mart in the correct giving level on the donors report.  Wal-Mart is only one example, since we have many scenarios like this one. I apologize for the lengthy explanation, but I do appreciate your input.

In the scenario you have listed I would have the Wal Mart Foundation Record in Arkansas and make this a parent Company record - this record would house all of the gifts since this is legally where all of your checks are coming from, and the IRS receipt acknowledgement must go to them.

 I would then have a record for each of the Distribution Centers with the rep being your primary contact - you could Soft Credit whichever one solcited the gift for you - this way you can send soft credit letters to them that do not mention the dollar amount of the gift and won't get you into audit trouble. I would have an Orgaanizational relationship with the Parent company on the record as well. If the Local Wal-Mart store is giving you Gifts in Kind and sponsorships that are paid from their store as opposed to the Arkansas store, they would require their own Constituent record. If the Local Distribution Centers are the ones you need to use for Recognition for the gifts, the soft-credit allows you to add up their value and any type of giving clubs you have established can be put on their attribute as opposed to the Parent Company. In this scenario for us, the main Parent Company record would be marked do not solicit and the solicitations would go to the soft credit recipients based on their giing level and relationship to our organziation.

Now this is just the way I do things here to make sure we follow IRS guidelines consistently and all mailings are managed properly.

Thanks Laurel.  I will inform our development director about the IRS guidelines.  The question of donor acknowledgment letters hasn't come up yet with the auditors, which are here next week, by the way.  I like the soft credit idea.  I am still in the process of learning this process and RE (always will be learning).  I am also in the research phase of implementing a policies and procedures manual.

I'm totally with you on wishing you could link a gift to a contact. We may have one org with many contacts and the person responsible for signing up for an event could change from one year to the next so it would be great to have that link for letters and to know who to contact for things like guest names instead of pulling up the original paperwork.

We have the same problem you do sometimes, multiple letters are created and we have to delete the extras. Sorry I don't have any answers!

Carrie, we have the same issue with events, such as our university's career expo.  We receipt the money from the sponsorship vendors through our foundation, and usually the same companies attend each year, but often the contact changes.  The majority of the vendors pay by credit card, so I need to send a credit card receipt back to them. It's a pain to remove the gift contact type from each previous gift contact.  It would be a lot easier to link the gift to the contact.  There is probably a way to flag the current contact on their contact record, attributes tab, but I don't know how that will work in Mail. I have a lot of ideas from the posts, so hopefully I will find what works best for us.  Thanks.

We to have similar issues so the following two “Add me to the list” requested suggestions may be of interest to you.

BB15590 – Unable to link contact to a gift

BB132203 – Unable to link a specific contact to a gift to use in Donor Acknowledgement Letters.

I would like to have this information exported to my Donor Acknowledgement letters as a merge field for selection therefore as I understand the content of the two suggestions, I have opted for BB15590.

Regards

Alan

Thank you Alan.  I will ask to be put on that list too.  I have been looking at the available fields in Mail for the mail merge of acknowledgment letters, and I don't see that as an option there.

Although this does not solve the problem of acknowledgment letters, we make "gift contact" a gift attribute and type in the name of the appropriate contact.  At least this way, if there are multiple contacts on a company record, you can open the gift and see which contact was responsible for a particular gift.

I have complained to Blackbaud for years about the inability to have multiple contact types for a single contact.  Some of our contacts participate in multiple events and campaigns.  All types of mailings would be easier and more accurate if these people could have a contact type for each event or campaign. 

Thanks Pamela.  I too just added a gift attribute on the gift record so that I can see who is responsible for the gift.  You are right. It doesn't solve the acknowledgment letter and mailling issues.  It helps to know that others are facing the same problem and I am not just plain stupid. :-)