Donor Receipting
What is Donor Receipting?
A donor receipt is a written acknowledgment that a donation was made to a nonprofit organization. While this is a simple and important concept to understand, it can oftentimes be a complex and cumbersome undertaking.
For example, it's not uncommon for a single donor to sponsor multiple fundraising efforts; including missionaries, their sending agencies, as well as any special projects that may arise. Each one of these gifts require a receipt - and in reality, not simply just a receipt, but rather a thoughtful acknowledgment to foster good donor relations.
The Problem:
The typical receipting process entails
a hefty amount of manual work. You may need to repeatedly copy and paste the donor information and keep track of all transactions. You should probably also remember to include an accurate update regarding the overseas work. Don’t forget to keep your messaging consistent with the donor’s context:
- Is this a first time donor?
- Are they paying with Crypto, Credit Card, ACH?
- Do they give monthly, quarterly, or annually?
- What cause(s) do they support?
At last, it’s finally time to mail out the receipt: all you need to do is print it out, stuff the envelope, address it and pay for the postage.
Whew! That’s a lot of things to keep track of, and that’s just 1 donor!
The solution:
Automated & Personalized Receipting
An initial proof of concept was created by TEAM.org in 2016. Five years later, Solertiae rebuilt it using a microservices architecture - making it more scalable, powerful, and flexible for more organizations.
We began mapping out all the various donor use cases so that
contextualized and personalized receipt
templates could be used. Not only that, we began generating and deploying the documents
automatically so that they could be sent out via email. We've generated hundreds of thousands of personalized receipt documents - all handsfree - which has significantly reduced overhead time and costs associated with physical mailing, printing & postage.
With automated receipts being less transactional and more relational, the end result is a happy donor and nonprofit.
The tool was so well received, that we decided to reconfigure it in such a way that it could serve multiple audiences - a key factor in keeping the ongoing cost of the tool as low as possible.
The main benefits include...
Contextualized and personalized receipt templates
Automatic deployment via email
100% handsfree
Reduced overhead time and costs
Happy donors and nonprofit staff members
When it comes to advancement, we understand that maintaining good donor relations is only part of the equation... while being able to maximize use of your data serves as the other critical component.
