End of Year Receipts Limitation & Solution December 28, 2005

So yesterday Cindy Thompson of the United Methodists Children's Services of Wisconsin calls, and because most of the company is out this week on vacation, I answered the call. She's putting together end of year thank-you letters, and wants each donor letter to include both the total for last year's giving and a list of the donor's donations. Easy, right? Except that she wants the letters addressed to each household.

Ah yes, that households issue again. Except it's a different issue from usual. You only have access to a donations table through a donations SmartList, not through a donor SmartList. That's one of those rules we established so you can't generate donation letters for people who haven't donated. There are always tradeoffs in software, and that's one we chose that's painted Cindy into a corner.

So the problem is this. When sending mail to a SmartList of donations so you can show the table of donations, GiftWorks only allows you to send to the giver of the donation, not to the household of the giver of the donation. But Cindy doesn't want to send just to the giver, because most of the time it is in fact the household that's giving, not just the person on the check. We're working on revamping our households handling, but in the meantime, Cindy discovered a way to solve this while we were talking through it.

While you can't send to a household from a donations SmartList, you can send to households from an individuals SmartList, and can include Last Year's Amount or Current Year Amount in the letter. So Cindy realized she can handle it by generating two pages for the letter: create the receipts showing the table of donations using a donations SmartList, and create the letter with the total giving and the household addressing using an individuals smartlist.

Now, I think that's a pain. But it works, and we're going to figure out a simpler, more sensible way of handling that specific issue. Thanks to Cindy for figuring this out with me. You can can visit the United Methodist Children's Services here.

Comments

Hi Charlie,

Have you come up with that better solution yet?

Merry Christmas,

Cindy