Prior to last week's session, we had voted on the topic for the training session, which was all about bulk receipts.
During the call we walked through all the steps you would need to take from beginning to set your receipt settings messages and signature to brushing up on on how to manage, edit, and create a receipt template through the end of pulling your reports and sending off receipts.
Here is a recap of those steps and what we covered during the call.
Q: What is the difference between the merge tags YTD Giving Amount and YTD Gifts Amount?
A: YTD Giving Amount is the total amount in dollars that a donor has given this year. YTD Gifts Amount is the total number of gifts that a donor has given this year.
Q: Can you input the in memorial of as a merged tag?
A: Yes, this is the Gift/Memorial merge tag, which will pull in the tribute message for each contact where you’ve inputted into this field.
Q: What is a best practice or recommendation when sending individual or bulk receipts?
A: Ultimately it depends on the organization’s processes. Individual receipts allow you to be more personal. Further, with the new layout update this will be a quick click of the button directly from a contact, gift, appeal or campaign page, making that one to one connection less timely. Sending one to many, or bulk receipts offers quick and efficient receipt sending. We suggest as a best practice that you make sure your report is pulling back the information you need, the contacts you are sending to have the correctly populated fields and you review printed receipts before sending them.
To provide more context into appropriately populated fields, be sure that the salutation fields are correct in your contact records; and that the format of your merge tags is pulling in data to the receipt for all the contacts you are sending to and not just some.
Q: Can you rename the name of a template?
A: You aren’t able to rename a template. As a work around you can save an updated template as a new name and remove the one you don’t want anymore.
Q: How can I make sure to not send communication to people that have requested such?
A: Within each contact record there is a Do Not Solicit checkbox. When you access a report you can pull that information back into a column. To make sure you aren’t reaching out to someone that has requested to no be solicited, filter on the Do Not Solicit column to only show false instances.
Q: How do I make sure the fonts I set up in DonorDock come across the way I want?
A: Fonts may not come across the way you want because they aren’t available on the DD server. On the flip side, if the server does have the fonts and you save it to a Word doc for example, it may not be on your machine, rendering a different font as well. As a best practice, it’s best to stick to common fonts, like arial, Helvetic, Times New Roman, Calibri, etc. In the meantime, DD will plan to put a knowledgebase article together for fonts that can be used.
Q: What’s the best way to set up reminders? In particular, our organization’s communication process is to acknowledge a gift within 48 hours and to send a thank you no later than 48 hours after that, for every gift.
A: In the scenario of creating a task for every gift, you can set up a quick rule with Zapier to create an action item with a due date whenever a new gift comes in. If you need some assistance, reach out to us to help with setting up that rule.
In cases where you want to be notified of major gifts or other notifications, you can create those settings within your profile. Just access your initials in the upper right hand corner, click on profile and scroll to the notification settings.