Donor Acknowledgment Letters

Before creating donation acknowledgement letters, you should run the Unacknowledged Donations report on the Reports screen. This report allows you to review who is going to be sent an acknowledgment letter and the information that is going to be included in each letter so that you can modify this information, if necessary, prior to creating the letters.

The FD in the first column of this report stands for First Donation and includes an asterisk (*) if this is the first donation in Keystone made by this donor.

To create donor acknowledgement letters and labels

Open the Reports tab in the Keystone ribbon and click Development.
The Reports screen appears.
Choose Development > Donations > Acknowledgement Letters on the Reports screen.
This displays the Select Unacknowledged Donation Documents window. This window lists the acknowledgement letters available, including custom affiliate letters if they exist. It also shows the count of donors for each letter that you have selected for the unacknowledged donations from the Donors screen.
Select which letters to include in the letter generation by checking the Include box next to that letter.
If you want to produce the acknowledgement letters now, click the Letters button to produce the letters.
Keystone exports the necessary information to your .../My Documents/MoreThanData/Exported Data.csv file, starts Word - if it is not already open - sends the selected documents to Word, and then transfers control to Word.
If you want to print the labels for the acknowledgement letters now, click the Labels or Envelopes button.
This opens Word with the labels or envelopes for the selected letters. Clicking the Merge To Printer button in Word sends these labels to the printer. Be sure that label sheets are loaded in the printer.

One of the fields exported for unacknowledged donations is a First Donation field. If this donation is the donor's first donation, this field has an asterisk. Otherwise, it is a blank. If this is printed on the label before the donor's name, the asterisk can be used as a prompt to the person mailing the letter to also include a brochure, for example, for new donors.

When you are finished printing the letters and labels, click the Post button to set the acknowledgement date for the donors in the selected documents.
The posting date is set to the current date. This marks all of the donations for which you have just created letters and labels as acknowledged on the Donations tab of the Donors screen.

After you post the acknowledgement letters, the name of the letter sent and the date it is sent is automatically posted in the Donor Logs, which can be viewed on the Logs tab on the Donors screen.

To learn more about how to create Donor Acknowledgement letters, refer to the Creating or Editing a Template with Microsoft Word section.