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Acknowledging Donations

Letters

Keystone can produce batch donation acknowledgements, where the acknowledgements are tied to specific letters defined in Keystone.

Keystone provides five standard donation acknowledgement letters. While the standard Affiliate Setup descriptions for these letters cannot be modified, the actual letters can be edited to meet your affiliate’s needs. For more information about setting up acknowledgement letter, see the Documents/Templates Tab section under Affiliate Setup.

Additionally, your affiliate can create your own new letters for use in Keystone. You can create the letter in Microsoft Word and use the Documents/Templates Tab section on the Affiliate Setup screen to add those letters for specific situations. This allows Keystone to automatically use your new letters for the situations you specify.

See the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section for information about how to create new letter templates in Microsoft Word. See the Donor Acknowledgement Letters section for information on how to generate and print acknowledgement letters.

Receipts

Keystone provides receipts both for contributions that do not include a value for goods and services and a receipt for contributions that do.

There are two different ways of providing receipts for donations.

1. Print receipts individually using the Get Receipt button in the lower left portion of the Donations tab.
1. Open the Donations tab for the donor.
2. Select the donation record for which you need to print a receipt.
3. If the donor’s contact record contains one or more individual contacts and an organization name, select what names you want to appear on the receipt.
   If the donor's contact record includes both individual contacts and an organization name, you will have one of two choices.
   
   1) If the selected donor here is the individual(s), a Print Organization on Receipt check box appears next to the Get Receipt button. Check this box to put both the individual(s) name and the organization name on the receipt. Leave the box unchecked to include only the selected donor’s individual name(s).
   
   2) If the selected donor here is the organization, a Print Contact(s) on Receipt check box appears next to the Get Receipt button. Check this box to put both the organization name and the individual(s) name on the receipt. Leave the box unchecked to include only the selected donor’s organization’s name(s).
4. Click the Get Receipt button to print the receipt.
   Here you can review and print the donor receipt Word Template.

Keystone adds a donor receipt number to the form that can be returned with the donor’s next gift so you can tell what kind of donation their last gift was and when it was made. The first part of this number is an FRA abbreviation if the donation was part of a fundraising activity. The second part of this number is when the gift was made in the format YYMMDD. The last part of this number is a unique donation ID. This donation ID is included in the Donation Detail Collection export report so you can look up the specifics of this donation. Example: WB-100315-1234 indicates that the donation was given on 3/15/10 to the Women's Build fundraising activity, and the donation ID for that gift was 1234.

Since this is a Word Template, it can be customized to meet your affiliate’s needs. See the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section for more information.

This method of producing receipts allows donations to be acknowledged individually as they are received. Neither the internal value of in-kind donations nor the Notes field are included on this acknowledgement. Donated in-kind items may be acknowledged by typing them on this receipt after printing, or by using a mail merge acknowledgement as described below.

2. Produce batches of receipts using the Acknowledgement Letters report and mail merge. 
   Using this method makes it easy to produce acknowledgements in a batch, and also to acknowledge in-kind items, which you can describe and note in the merged acknowledgement letters. This method also allows your affiliate to customize the format of the acknowledgement sent to the donor.
   
1. Choose Development > Donations > Acknowledge Letters on the Reports screen.
2. Check the Include checkbox next to the letters you wish to generate.
3. Click the Letters button to produce acknowledgement letters, or the Labels or Envelopes button to produce mailing labels or envelopes for the letters.
4. Click the Post button on the Select Unacknowledged Donations Documents window when you are done producing letters and labels.
   This tells Keystone to fill in the Acknowledged Date for all of the donations for which you just printed letters and labels. This also posts an entry to the donor log indicating when you sent the acknowledgement.

Details on using reports and exporting data are discussed in more detail in the Reports chapter. See Using Labels and Export Data Reports for details on producing merged documents using data exported from Keystone.