Donations: send a summary of donations

Many non-profits that collect donations also need to send out donation summaries, for tax or record keeping purposes. Now, Levitate can generate a summary of donations by combining the power of donation data on the Donation Board and a new merge field for donations.

How should I set up the send?

First, you'll navigate to the Donation Board. The board can list donors or individual donations; use the Show dropdown in the filter row to choose Show: Donations. Filtering by a campaign switches to the Donations view for you. The summary lists every donation that matches your current filters for each recipient, so use filters (campaign, date, amount) to define what's included. Selecting rows chooses who receives an email. This matters because some donors have donations logged that span years and years.

Note: Filters that apply only to donors, such as Lifetime and Last Donation Date, aren't applied to the summary.

Here, I've filtered by a campaign! You can also filter by date, amount, etc:

Donation Board filtered by the Fall Fundraiser campaign

After filtering, select the donations of the donors you want to email, or just choose all. Each donor's summary includes all of their donations that match the filters, even ones you didn't select. I wanted to send a message about all of these donations since they happened in the same calendar year:

Donations selected on the Donation Board

Once you've selected the donors you'd like to email, choose 'Send Email' and go through the steps as you would with a normal campaign setup. You can either choose an existing template or start from scratch. Here's an example of what it'll look like on your end:

Email editor with the first name and donations merge fields

If you've ever sent a campaign through Levitate, you've seen the blue box around a field that magically pulls the corresponding data to the contact you're sending to. This is how our donation summary works— it's a merge field. If you aren't familiar with how merge fields work, I would highly recommend checking out the article linked. To add it to your emails, open the merge field menu in the email editor and choose Donations > Donation Summary, or simply type {{donations}}, and the merge field will appear. Since the merge field is sending a different piece of information to each recipient, you will just see the magic blue box merge field.

Note: The donation summary fills in only when you send from the Donation Board's 'Send Email'. If you send an email with {{donations}} any other way, the summary is empty. The Donations merge field menu appears only on accounts that have the Donation Board.

To give some context, here is what the recipient sees on their end. The summary is a table of each donation's date and amount, newest first, with a total. In-kind donations show their description:

Received email listing each donation's date and amount with a total