While your big "year-end push" is over, you likely still have some important things to take care of - such as sending acknowledgements for those final year-end donations, following up with new donors, creating those year-end reports, and sending out donation summaries to your donors from last year.
Thankfully, you can use Donor Management to accomplish all of these tasks in one place!
Year-end donation summary letters designed to be more than just a list of your donor's contributions from the past year. These letters are also meant to be an opportunity for you to recognize your donors for the important impact they have had in helping accomplish your nonprofit's mission this year - and hopefully, beyond.
You want to make sure that your donors not only feel appreciated, but to also that they understand how important their support is to your organization going into the new year.
Creating Direct Mail Year-End Donation Summaries:
From your Donor Management Dashboard, select "Communication" from the left-hand navigation, and click on "Direct Mail" from the dropdown menu.
Next, click on the "Add Direct Mail" button in the top-right corner of your screen.
Follow the step-by-step process in creating a new Direct Mail letter to send, but be mindful of the following:
When asked if you want to "Create Only One Letter Per Household?", selecting "yes" will list all donations made by the entire household when you generate your "Last Year Donation Summary." If you want to provide individual letters to each donor within a household, you'll want to instead select "no."
When selecting recipients, you'll want to select a filter that includes all of your donors from the past year. You can either used a saved filter that has already been created, or you can use the recommended filter titled "Made donation in calendar year 20XX" instead.
You then have a few options with respect to the content of this year-end mailing.
Option 1: Using our sample recommended content (including the necessary merge fields), which can be found below.
Option 2: Using the pre-built template created for this type of mailing, which can be found by selecting "yes" when asked if you'd like to "Create from Template," and selecting "Last Year Donation Summary."
Option 3: Using the merge field *|DONATION_SUMMARY_LAST_YEAR|* within a communication that you've written yourself, to pull in the relevant information.
Once you have finalized a draft of your direct mail, we recommend that you download a preview to ensure that the downloaded product looks like what you were anticipating.
Once everything looks good, you can then click on either "Generate Letters" or "Generate Letters & Labels" to complete this process. You'll receive an email once your direct mailing is completed and ready to be downloaded.
Creating Email Donation Summaries
From your Donor Management Dashboard, select "Communication" from the left-hand navigation, and click on "Email Blast" from the dropdown menu.
Next, click on the "Add " button in the top-right corner of your screen.
Similarly to a direct mail donation summary, you'll want to select a filter that includes all of your donors from the past year when selecting recipients. You can either used a saved filter that has already been created, or you can use the recommended filter titled "Made donation in calendar year 20XX" instead.
You have two options to choose from when building this email blast.
Option 1: Using our sample recommended content (including the necessary merge fields), which can be found below.
Option 2: Using the merge field *|DONATION_SUMMARY_LAST_YEAR|* within a communication that you've written yourself, to pull in the relevant information.
Once you have finalized a draft of your email blast, we recommend that you send yourself a test email, to ensure that the email looks like what you were anticipating.
Sample Templates for Year-End Donation Summaries
Direct Mail Template
*|TODAYS_DATE|*
*|NAME|*
*|ADDRESS|* *|ADDRESS_2|*
*|CITY|*, *|STATE|* *|ZIP_CODE|*
*|FIRST_NAME|*,
As the [Job Title] of [Organization], I would like to personally thank you for making our work possible. Your kindness this past year supported [describe impact]. Your generosity [verb] us to look beyond the challenges of [describe challenges and difficult landscape] and [verb] our full effort and heart into [outcome] for [population] we serve together.
With deep gratitude,
[Name]
[Job Title]
*|DONATION_SUMMARY_LAST_YEAR|*
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Email Blast Template
*|FIRST_NAME|*,
As the [Job Title] of [Organization], I would like to personally thank you for making our work possible. Your kindness this past year supported [describe impact]. Your generosity [verb] us to look beyond the challenges of [describe challenges and difficult landscape] and [verb] our full effort and heart into [outcome] for [population] we serve together.
With deep gratitude,
[Name]
[Job Title]
*|DONATION_SUMMARY_LAST_YEAR|*