[Odb-help] Using the "giftcategories" feature of ODB for custom thank yous

[odb-help at lists.democracygroups.org]

Good afternoon!

  I wanted to let you all know about a feature of ODB that
we have been keeping "secret" for a while!

  Actually, it is not a complete secret, but we suspect that
there are a lot of folks out there who could use it but are not
doing so.

  This is the feature that allows your organization to enter
all kinds of non-gift payments into ODB, and to keep that
info separate from the info on gifts or member dues.

  And this feature works best in 0.9.6b, because that version
implements a few improvements in how a donor's basic
status information is displayed and updated (at the suggestion
of Randy Divinski, a local consultant who has set up several
groups here in the Boston area with ODB).

  To describe how it works, I am going to tell the story of a
fictitious organization, the Arctic Cultural Club (ACC).  ACC
raises funds from:

-2 grants from the city (of Nome, Alaska)
-150 individual members
-5 larger "angel donors"
-an annual spaghetti dinner for 300 people
-an annual chartered ice fishing trip
-sales of ACC tshirts
-web donations from the e newsletter

The income categories they decided on when they set up
ODB are as follows:

A - Angel Donor
G - Grant
M - Membership
S - Spaghetti Fundraiser
F - Fishing Trip
T - T Shirt Sales
W - Website Donations

  So, on a Friday in early February, Jane was entering a few dozen
of checks that have came in that week.  They consisted of:

5 checks for $10 -- late payment for the ACC annual dinner
19 membership renewals for $20 each
1 large check from an "angel" for $300.
6 orders of t shirts for $15 each
1 check from groundspring.org for $97, representing 4 $25 gifts in January
2 prepayments for the feb. 28 fishing trip, $1500 total

So Jane separated all the checks from the donation
slips and entered them into ODB.  Then she filled out a
deposit slip, went to the bank, and put the entire
deposit in -- a total of $2417.


Jane wanted to send out the thank you notes that day, but
she had a dentist appointment, then had to pick up
her 5 year old from kindergarten.  So the thank yous
would have to wait until Monday.
Fortunately, with ODB this was not a problem.  (It is even
possible to wait a couple of weeks and print the thank yous
at once for several deposits).

So, the weekend passed by, Jane came in, and resumed her
admin work.  She needed to:
a) enter the deposit into her accounting program (Quickbooks), and
b) send out the thank you notes -- not for all 36 checks, but only
    to the people who were making "donation" payments.  The
   folks who bought the t-shirts would just receive the shirt, and
   the payments for the fishing trip and dinner would just be
   recorded; the dinner people would see photos in the newsletter
   so ACC didn't really feel it needed to send another mail piece.
c) make sure the thank you notes actually referred to the
    method of giving, so that the online donors would receive
    a different letter from those who paid by check, etc.

Fortunately, when Jane set up ODB, she took advantage
of the GiftCategories feature.  This is available in all recent
versions.  To see it just click on the "wrench" and then
click on "Modify settings...".  If you do not see it, just let
us know.  It should be about 2 screens from the bottom
of the list of settings (this is a list that will be reorganized
in an upcoming ODB version).

Jane had set the giftcategories setting to:

A G M W

so that those categories would be treated as gifts... and
so that ODB would generate thank you notes only for
gifts in those categories.


Furthermore, Jane had created four different versions of her
thank you letter, one for Angels, one for Grants, one forMembership
 donations, and one for online donors.

The thank you letters were created in the "mergetext"
folder as described in the ODB user manual.  They
include the merged fields for the date of payment and the
amount.  The letters were created using Notepad, and they
were called:
angels.txt  grantack.txt  thank.txt  webthank.txt

Finally Jane went into the ODB settings area to adjust
the "thankyoudefs" field, to associate the letters with
various categories.  The thankyoudefs looked like this:

A-angels.txt G-grantack.txt M-thank.txt W-webthank.txt


With all of this set up, the actual work involved in calculating
the amounts to be entered in to Quickbooks -- generating
the thank you letters, and addresssing envelopes -- only
took 5 minutes.  Here is what Jane needed to do:

1) go into select records, and choose the "donations" option
2) enter a date range that included the dates she recently
    did data entry, for which you did not thank anyone yet.
    To just thank the people entered on one day, Feb 4, she
    used the date range of 2/4/05 to 2/4/05
3) click on the Search button, and doublecheck that the total
    dollar value was $2420 ($3 more than was deposited into the
    bank, so we can give our web donors credit for the full
    donation of $25, not the amount after the 3% service
    charge is deducted by Groundspring).  At this point she
    also clicked on the "print summary" button to print out a
    listing of the income categories and amounts, suitable
    for entering into Quickbooks.
4)  then she selected the four categories, A G M and W, using
    the Ledger Category button, and did the search again.  Jane
    noticed that the total dollar value was reduced to just $777,
    and the number of payments was reduced from 36 to 24,
    reflecting just the "gift" part of her recent deposit.
5) Click on the OK button to bring the donors back into the
    Main Menu of ODB.
6) Click the Print button
7) Click the Thank You Note button
8) Select <use category default> from the pulldown menu
    so that all the thank you notes will be customized to
    take advantage of the custom thank yous she created.
9) Load letterhead into her printer (she had previously
   customized the "topmarginpoints" feature of ODB
   so that the thank you note would start at the right place)
10) Click the print button.

(Jane went next door to grab a cup of coffee while the notes
were printing.  10 minutes later, when she returned to the
office, 24 nicely printed thank you notes were waiting
for her!)

Then Jane signed the thank you notes and decided to
prepare the envelopes.  To do this, (without exiting from
the "print" screen), she:

1) selected "envelopes" from the printing
    format box on the print screen. (if she wanted to
    use labels instead, she would select "labels")
2) loaded envelopes into the her printer, following whatever
    instructions came with the device.  (she could
    have loaded a sheet of labels instead)
3) click on "Print" again.

The resulting stack of envelopes was in the
same order as the letters she printed earlier.  This made it
very easy for her volunteer to match them up properly
later on that day!

In fact, it was so easy that next month, Jane celebrated
by buying a $400 laser printer (with an envelope feeder),
so that she could print out two weeks' worth of thank
you notes at once.

Jane got into the habit of keeping a log on her bulletin
board so that she would know the dates she had sent
out the thank yous, and the date ranges that she had
used, so that she would not send out any duplicates.
She even sent us the log so that we could attach
it to this email!

I hope this is helpful to all of you out there who
have organizations doing work that is just as
important as Jane's group!

-rich


p.s. we are often asked, "what would happen if Jane
didn't set up the gift categories" but still wanted to
generate the thank yous using this method.  The
answer is, the example presented above might have
some problems, if one individual had given $750 for
the ice trip on 2/12 and had given $50 for membership
on 2/7, for instance.  In this situation, if you failed to
put anything into the "giftcategories", the $750 would
show up on the thank you letter, and not the $50 that
you intended to print a letter for.  The reason for using
giftcategories is to have greater control over the "last gift"
field in ODB, so that it gives a true reflection of the last
date when someone engaged in charitable behavior
towards your organization.
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