DONOR STATEMENTS: How to send an End of Year Report to donors and more

Whether it's an year end report, or a specific period of your choosing, you can create Reports in BetterUnite, define your data range, and we will create a formatted statement document ready to be sent to your donors.

Here are the basic steps to produce a statement or report and send it to your donors:

CREATE A REPORT

Create a Report
- Give your report a meaningful title, as this will be displayed in the report that your donor receives
- Provide a Start and End date - this is what determines which donations to include in the report
- Save the Report
You can now preview your report with each donor. Click the icon to launch the preview window, which will ask you to select a particular donor. Start typing in the donor name, and auto-complete will suggest from all existing donors. When you find the matching donor, select it. The "Preview Report" button will then become enabled. Click this button to go to the Preview Report page.
On the Preview page, you can also click the "Print Report" button to see a PDF version of the report. The PDF version is what the donors will eventually access.

SEND REPORT

Once you create a report(s), there will be a unique URL that each donor can access that will give them their specific information for each particular report. This URL is made available when you export contacts to file. For instance, if I create two reports, and I go to the Contacts page, filter my contacts to whatever list I want to see, and click the "Export to File" button, the resulting Excel export will include two additional columns per contact record, i.e. one additional column per report that show the unique URL per statement per contact.

While BetterUnite is not a mass email platform, we do provide the information you need to make this process as simple as possible. You can then use the above export with the unique URLs for each donor, and import it into a mailing list in your preferred email marketing platform, e.g. Mailchimp. We do not know what fields you may have created in your email platform, but we provide you the data, and you can easily map it to any custom fields you may have in your email platform.

For example, you may create a custom field in Mailchimp for "report url", and when you're importing the above export file, you can map one of the report url columns from the contact export file to the "report url" field in your Mailchimp system. After this is done, you can create the outreach email campaign in Mailchimp and simply map the "report url" dynamic field anywhere in your campaign content. This url will allow the recipient of the email to click it and download the PDF of their unique report.

With this approach, you are able to utilize the full capabilities of your email marketing platform to create beautiful and branded emails while using the export from BetterUnite to provide you with the specific data points.

VIEW STATEMENT(S)

After you have created your report above, you can view it for a particular donor or all donors that have a donation within the report's date range criteria. Click the search icon on the particular statement to bring up options for viewing this statement.

In the pop up window, you can select a donor for which you'd like to view the statement.

You can alternatively select the "Preview all statements" link, which will preview all statements for all donors that have a matching donation within the period provided by your statement.

Note: although the list of statements will appear to be closely appended, there is a page break between each statement if printing.

EXPORT STATEMENTS TO EXCEL

In some cases, you may just want the total information in an export in order to do your own work in exporting or merging with other data. For this purpose, you can use the following option provided to you.

Once you have your statement report created, you can click the Export Statement on the particular report you're trying to use as the basis of your export. If you click this button to export, the system will determine all donors that have made a payment within the date range defined in the statement, and will provide you an export file that sums up contributions for each of these donors.

See example below:

EXPORT ITEMIZED DONATIONS BY DONOR

This export is always available for you in giving->transactions page. You can do an advanced search, filter by a date range, and click Export transactions which will provide you the donation records within that date range. You can then use Excel to use this data as you need e.g. pivot table by donor.

Need Additional Help?

We're here to assist you in any way we can. Don't hesitate to reach out to support@betterunite.com

Let's go do some good.