Acknowledging your donors is an important part of the fundraising process - but sometimes, it can be hard to keep up with all of the acknowledgements that need to be sent.

If you find yourself in this situation, you can easily send a bunch of letters or emails to those donors who need to be acknowledged through Donor Management. We'll walk you through those steps below.

First, you'll want to create a template for either an email blast or a direct mailing. Although you are creating a bulk acknowledgement, you'll want to make sure you're selecting either "Direct Mail" or "Email Blast" from the "Add Template" button's dropdown options.

Be sure that you're setting this template up correctly and selecting the right type of communication, since acknowledgement templates are unique to each communication tool. You won't be selecting any of the "acknowledgement" templates for this bulk process.

You'll want to keep these particular messages on the more generic side, because some of the "merge fields" that are available for use within a true acknowledgement template aren't available in an email blast or direct mailing. In particular, you may want to avoid mentioning a specific donation amount or date.

You'll then want to identify and isolate out all of the unacknowledged donations that you need to address.

From the "Giving" tab in the left-hand navigation, you'll want to click on the option to "Create Filter," and then select the options for "Acknowledged" and then "is false" from the dropdown options that appear.

Be sure to click the option to "Save Filter" once it's been created, so you can use this filter to identify unacknowledged donations in the future.

This particular filter is going to look for every donation in your system that has yet to be marked as "acknowledged." You can further customize this filter to make it more specific by adding other conditions, such as narrowing down the time frame you're looking at.

For more information on building complex filters, click here.
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Once you've created both the bulk "acknowledgement" template and the filter to identify unacknowledged donations, you'll want to create a new direct mail letter or email blast.

You should then be able to select the template that you created, and then select the saved filter under the "Recipients" step of the process.

You may then want to send yourself a test email or download a test letter, to make sure that everything looks correct. If it does, then you can click either "Send Now" for emails, or "Generate Labels and Letters" for a physical letter.

Once you've sent your bulk acknowledgements to your donors, you'll want to return to the "Giving" tab from the left-hand navigation options. You'll then want to click on the "Saved Filters" option, and select the filter you just used to send those acknowledgements.

Once you've run this filter, you'll want to scroll down and click on the small checkbox next to the word "Contact" to select all of the gift records included in this filter.

Finally, you'll want to scroll back up and select "Mark as Acknowledged" from the "Bulk Actions" dropdown menu. This will update all of those donations to reflect as "acknowledged" moving forward.