It’s an interesting question.
Perhaps you have these matters well in hand and have conducted focus groups with a broad representation of your donors, but there is always the Peter Drucker question: “Who is my customer, and what does my customer consider value?”
In this case, if the donor is in fact thinking of their taxes (which they likely are, even though, at the moment, very few of them can probably benefit from a deduction for a charitable contribution), providing the information about the gifts that they might be able to deduct alongside other transactions that they shouldn’t try to deduct might not be received as a valuable enhancement.
If you’re trying to express appreciation for a range of the donor’s support of the organization, I might wonder whether tax time is the best time to do that.
An additional challenge (which you’ve probably already addressed if you’ve been sending a receipt-type format on hard-credit gifts) is the possibility of different perspectives in attributing gifts to the year in question.
For example, suppose a donor sends in a reply form for a year-end credit card gift, which the recipient doesn’t receive and process until the beginning of the next year.
For a one-off receipt, the recipient puts on an early-January processing date and the donor can decide whether they claim a gift in the previous year.
But if the recipient is sending a summary to the donor, that gift wasn’t made until the new year, so it isn’t included. The donor, however, thinks of that as a gift that they made in the past year, so there is now an additional opportunity for conflict.
It’s not an insurmountable difficulty, and probably not too many donors would be affected and would decide to pursue the matter. I certainly get summaries from a variety of organizations that I support. But, in addition to the added work, there is an added complexity.
In any case, it’s probably valuable to have as clear an idea as possible about what your goal is, and about possible complexities.
My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.
Good luck!
Alan
Alan S. Hejnal
Data Quality Manager
Smithsonian Institution - Office of Advancement
600 Maryland Avenue SW, Suite 600E
P.O. Box 37012, MRC 527
Washington, DC 20013-7012
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From: Advancement Services Discussion List <
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG> On Behalf Of John Taylor
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2019 1:17 PM
To:
FUNDSVCS@LISTSERV.FUNDSVCS.ORG
Subject: Re: [FUNDSVCS] Samples of annual letter to donors listing last years giving
Have you found this to be useful in the past? What are your hoped-for gains in the future?
I'm finding more organizations eliminating an annual summary (except upon request) rather than launching one. They are quite time-consuming/costly, and donor relations surveys suggest they aren't that meaningful.
The argument that "Our donors expect this" really does not seem to hold up to those surveys. What seems to energize donors more is NOT being told what they already know (how much they gave), but getting impact statements on how their gifts were used.
John
John H. Taylor
Principal, John H. Taylor Consulting
2604 Sevier St.
Durham, NC 27705
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919.816.5903 (cell/text)
Serving the Advancement Community Since 1987
On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 1:07 PM Amy Reed <
amreed@anderson.edu<mailto:
amreed@anderson.edu>> wrote:
We are revamping the letter/statement we send to our donors each year in January listing their prior year donations. This has traditionally been a vanilla tax receipt type document listing gifts where they received legal credit. But for next year we are planning to transition it to include a recap of their overall annual support via personal giving and any third party giving, not so much of a tax related document. Since we will be listing gifts from their DAF, etc. on this, I'm curious what format and wording others have used on a similar document.
I would love to see some samples from anyone that prepares something similar and wouldn't mind sharing. I didn't find any on the download site.
Thanks,
Amy
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