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Chapter 15 Thank you responses ................................................................................................... 1 Single Thank You letters .............................................................................................................. 1 Thank you “required” OR not.................................................................................................... 1 “THANK YOU SENT?” IS Date stamp modifiable .................................................................... 1 One-at-a-time thank yous ......................................................................................................... 2 Setting up a template ............................................................................................................... 3 Bulk thank yous ............................................................................................................................ 3
Chapter 15 Thank you responses
Sending the right thank you to the right person at the right time is a very important job for any organization. ebase helps you handle this in several ways, from sending a single email to printing a batch of form letters and many places in between. NOTE: Remember, as part of your thank you routine to indicate either by adding a log entry or from the payment log entry thank you fields to mark in ebase that a thank you was sent. Few things can create that sinking feeling in your stomach than seeing a big list of people when you don’t know if they’ve been thanked for their gift! There are two basic paths to producing standard thank you letters—singly and batch. Both are explained below.
SINGLE THANK YOU LETTERS
If you need to send out a thank you to one person, the easiest way to do it is directly from the payment data entry screen. When you enter a new payment, there is an area in the middle left-hand section of the screen with several fields that will help you manage your thank you letters.
Thank you “required” OR not
By their own choice, some donors do not wish to receive a thank you. For example, the donor may be a foundation who does not want a formal receipt. Use the field “Required?” to indicate whether or not a thank you should be sent: Enter “Yes” if a thank you is required, and “No” if it isn’t. Entering the appropriate value in this field will allow you to honor the wishes of your organization’s constituents.
“THANK YOU SENT?” IS Date stamp modifiable
When you send a thank you, you have the option of letting ebase automatically fill the “Thank you sent?” field with the current date. However, this date can be changed. You may type in any date that fits your needs. For example, you may be cleaning up older data and know that a thank you was sent but not recorded. In this instance you can replace the blank date with the correct one.
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One-at-a-time thank yous
Each of the choices below sends or prints a single thank you for the related payment. Here are your choices: send an email thank you from within ebase send data to a template and print within ebase export data to a form letter
Steps:
Click on “Send Thank You” to start the process. Choose a salutation type (preferred, formal, informal) Select a receipt format (email, template, word merge) Follow the steps below for each format type:
Steps for email:
1. Select “email” from the receipt format pop-up box. 2. Chose from the list displayed. (See below for how to set up your email templates.) 3. Fill out the form and either Send or Cancel.
Steps for template:
1. Select “template for printed receipt” from the receipt format pop-up box. 2. Choose a template from the list. (See below for how to create new templates) 3. Fill out the form, which is partially pre-populated with information from Admin>Setup and partially from the donor record. 4. Chose either Print or Cancel. 5. You will then be asked if you “want to print an envelope as well”. Click on Yes if you do. 6. Next, you will be asked if you “want to record this receipt as a log entry”. Click on Yes if you do and a “Thank You Donation” log entry will be created for the current contact. Please note that the “Thank you sent?” area will automatically be changed to “yes” and the date box will automatically be filled with the current date.
Steps for word merge:
1. Select “word merge document” from the “Select receipt format” pop-up box. 2. You will see the “Record Receipt” pop-up box which will ask you if you want to “mark this entry as having a receipt”. Click on “yes” if you want the current date to be written in the “thank you sent” date box. 3. Next, you will be asked to locate the merge template you wish to use for the receipt (see picture below). 4. Open the appropriate form letter. After you do, you will receive 2 pop-up boxes that will “ask” your permission to run the SQL commands that are necessary to produce the merge document. If you wish to continue, click on “yes” when prompted. 5. The thank you letter should appear on the screen, ready to go!
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Once the form letter has been selected, ebase sends a merge file (Thank You.mer) to the folder and opens the letter. NOTE: If ebase complains that it can’t find the Thank You.mer file, your export has not disappeared—this message means that ebase cannot locate the .mer file in the default “ebasewordprocessing” folder. Continue to look for it, starting with the FileMaker Pro folder.
Setting up a template
You start to create a receipt template in ADMIN>Codes. Let’s say you have a “Each One Reach One board member” campaign and you want to be able to mail a special thank you to anyone who donates to the campaign. The first step in creating a template for this is to create a new Communications code called “Each Reach thank you.” During the creation process you have the chance to set many Optional Settings. Under B) Payment/Pledge Management click in the checkbox Receipt Template? Then click on the blue Setup wording to the left of the checkbox. This is where you create the body of your thank you. The donor’s address information is automatically filled in during the actual production of a thank you receipt.
BULK THANK YOUS
When running a campaign, doing bulk thank you letters is very efficient because sending the same thank you to a large group through a mail merge, cuts down your time.
Steps:
1. Do a find for the group to receive the thank yous. For example, everyone who made a new dues payment from 4/1/05 to 4/15/05.
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2. Export the data through one of the ebase Reports, such as Membership>Member Renewal, Export (automatically includes fields like “Last Mbr Pymt” and “Mbr Expire Date”) or Contact>Contacts Custom Export (which allows you to add a log entry as part of the process) to the Thank You folder which also houses your Thank You letters. 3. Open the applicable form letter and browse to find the correct data file. 4. Print the letter. 5. Last but not least, if a log entry has not been added as part of the export process, add the appropriate log entry. Few things are worse than looking back at last month’s donors and not knowing whether any thank you letters have been sent!