[Odb-help] Generating Merged IRS receipt letters to donors of $250 or more

[odb-help at lists.democracygroups.org]

Dear ODB Users:

You probably know that if you are a nonprofit in the US, you are
supposed to mail a receipt by Saturday (Jan. 15) if the total of
all contributions for a donor for 2004 is over $250 .  There is some
language that is required by the IRS, that you say "no goods
and services were received in exchange for the donation."

We covered this issue two years ago on the odb-help email list:
http://lists.democracygroups.org/pipermail/odb-help/2003-January/000050.html

But many of you are new, and the directions there
are dated, since ODB has been improved over time.  In
fact, we released a new version of ODB (0.9.6a) today
that is necessary to follow the procedure below.

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE FOR GENERATING LETTERS FOR DONORS
OF $250 OR MORE:

1 - click on Select Records to go into the Record Selection Tool
2 - click the 'donations' radio button
3 - from the pulldown labeled "View" at the top, choose
    'Donors by Tot Given'
4 - enter 1/1/04 and 12/31/04 as your start and end dates;
    you should be using 'Date of Payment'
5 - if you have payments that are not donations, or that you
    handle by some other means, i.e. event admission, large
    foundation grants, 'pass thru' gifts from groundspring,
    etc., you can exclude them as needed.  Usually this is
    done by just selecting the appropriate 'type' categories.
6 - click 'search'
7 - click on 'Save This Data...'
8 - choose the 'Extended Donor Report Comma Delimited' option
    under 'save file as type' at the bottom of the Window
9 - Save the file (the donors) to a location you can easily
    find.

You can now use this data to generate your letters.  In
our case our data file was named '2004donors.csv'.  Here is
a rough procedure for doing the mail merge (using MS-Word).

A - prepare the data
    1 - double click on the data file '2004donors.csv' to
        open it.  (this will open it in Excel, if you generated the
        data using 0.9.6a.  Earlier ODB versions do not generate .csv
        files that can be opened this way, due to a Microsoft bug.)
    2 - Fix the data by removing any donors of less than $250
        for the year.  (Some groups may elect to mail to
        everyone on the list, to remind donors what they did.)
    3 - Fix the zip code column by selecting it, then right
        clicking, select Format Cells, then double click on
        'special' to format this as a 'zip code' (works in
        Word 97)
    4 - Save the data file as a real Excel (.xls) file by
        going to File -> Save As... -> Save as Type ->
        Microsoft Excel Workbook

B - prepare the "main document" for your mail merge; we
    have a sample main document you may download at:
    http://organizenow.net/odb/jan15merge.doc

    You should customize it and save it on your computer.
    While you have this file open, you should be able to use
    the mail merge feature on your word processing program
    to select the data file saved in step A 4.

C - Merge the letters to a "new document"

D - Individually go in and edit (or delete) letters as
    needed before printing them onto your letterhead (or
    if you add a simple letterhead in step B you could
    just print the letters onto plain paper.

Hope this is useful, to someone!!



Note: The sample document we provided does not use
the "Salutation" field.  We have already implemented
a version of ODB which includes this in the donor
report; email us for more information.  Thanks.

-Rich Cowan




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