We work with a lot of non-profits, and this task comes up every year. So, how do we get ‘er done?
So, first off, before you even think about hitting that magical “generate report!” button, you need to think about ensuring your data is correct. We’ve run into many challenges, but here are two examples:
- Duplicate entries. You don’t want John Donor to get 5 statements for 5 donations. Try using Salesforce’s built-in duplicate detection tools.
- Donations vs. Sales. You need to ensure that donations and sales—things like products or tickets for events, for instance, might not cary the same tax implications—aren’t lumped together.
At the end of the day, it’s critical to think through all of these variables to ensure you’re delivering a clean, simple, and correct statement to your donors.
Unfortunately, there are no functions built directly into Salesforce or the Non-Profit Success Pack (NPSP) that allow you to simply generate and send year-end statements to your donors. That being said, there are numerous third-party tools—Apsona, Conga, or Formstack—that will get the job done. The down side is, these third-party apps are not free.
In our estimation though, for most large organizations, the cost is almost always well worth it in simple human capital that won’t be spent reconciling reports manually.
Now, what about smaller organizations that don’t have the need or the buying power for these integrations? The easiest way to do this manually, is to export your donor list and their donations into a CSV. That file can be mail-merged with a Word Doc to fill in the relevant info. While not the most automated or bulletproof way, it is fairly efficient and effective.
