Creating and Sending Summary Letters or Emails

This article walks you through the process to generate your year-end thank you letter:

• Create and upload a form letter (if you have already uploaded form letters, you can skip this step).
• (U.S. organizations only) Either generate your summary letter for each donor who gave in the previous year or for a specific list of donors identified using the Advanced Query Wizard.
• Print your letters or email them. 

NOTE: If you are a Canadian organization and you want to use the Summary Letters/Receipt Wizard, you must apply summary receipts to gifts as you enter them into CRM and in chronological order. Do not start attaching receipts with the newest donation and working backward, especially across the new year. The receipt numbers that Salsa CRM assigns to donations are sequential.

Create Your Thank You Letter

The first step is to create your thank you letter. You need to use our summary letter template as a base to get the summary table of donations to populate. You cannot edit the table; this will break the summary.

Once you have downloaded your template and edited your copy, the next step is to create a Form Letter. 

Upload and Name your Thank You Letter

To make the form letter...

1. Upload the document to Salsa CRM by going to Manage > Documents > Word Processor.
   
   
2. If you see the Google Docs screen come up, click Other Word Processing Options.
   
   
3. Once you see the word processing options screen, choose to upload a file from your computer.
   
   
4. Choose your letter 
5. Click Save to Database.
6. Set a description for your document.
7. If you want to send a summary email rather than a print letter, you will also need to upload a TXT file for your email body. The letter will be an email attachment instead.
8. Go to Manage > Configuration > Form Letters & Receipts, and choose Add Form Letter to Screen.
   
   
9. Make your letter type a donation letter.
   
   
10. Check the boxes for Summary and Display on Dropdown.
11. If you’re printing the letter, leave the delivery method as Mail; switch to Email for an emailed summary letter. For an email, you’ll also need to add...
    • The email body document you’ve uploaded.
    • The “From” email address.
    • The email subject.
    • The attachment name.
12. For a printable letter, click Select Document. For an email, click Select Attachment. 
    1. With the Document Type set to DOCX, click Search.
    2. Choose your letter from the list.
13. Click Save.
    • If you intend to send this email to everyone who donated in the previous year, you can skip ahead at this point to running the summary wizard. 
    • If you’re only sending summaries to those who gave over $250 in 2020 (per IRS regulations), the next thing we need to do is make a summary letter group. 

Segment your Summary Letter Group

1. Select Manage > Configuration > Groups,
2. Add a new group.
   
   
3. Name your group and save it. 
4. Go to Reports > Queries > Advanced Query Wizard and create a new constituent type query.
5. Build a simple query for those who gave $250 or more in 2020.
6.  Use the query wizard to add those records to your group.
7. Now that we have our group, the final step is to run the Summary Wizard. 

Run the Summary Wizard

1. Go to Manage > Documents > Summary Letters & Receipts.
   
   
1. If you’re sending a summary to all of your donors, choose All Donors from the audience dropdown menu. 
2. If you’re segmenting with groups, you’ll select Donors in a Specific Group. Choose your group and then click Search.
2. Choose your summary form letter.
3. Click Process Letters to print (or email) your summary letters:
4. Depending on the number of letters, this part can take a while! Wait until your entire list has loaded based on the progress bar.
5. Once the list has completed loading, you can edit any letter or “Print All.” For an email, this button will say “Email All”
6. You can also print labels if you need to; choose the type of label onto which you’d like to print.
7. If you want, you can also edit the font by unchecking the “Use Default” box.
8. And click Format Labels. A new tab opens with your addresses formatted to the label, ready to print.

NOTE: Your print job might take several hours to queue and print (especially if your letter has extensive graphics); you cannot restart the print job if a previous process is still running. Access the Long-Running Processes menu (Tools > Long Running Processes) to cancel the process.