The IRS requires nonprofits to acknowledge gifts of $250 or more in a single year from one individual. The letters are supposed to be sent by January 15 of each year. This tip sheet is newly updated for ODB 1.1; it was last published in 1/2007.

A - Find the donors

1. click on Advanced Search to go into the Advanced Search Tool
2. select 'payments' from the 'search for' pull down menu at top
3. from the pulldown labeled "Generate Report Of" at the top, choose 'Payers by Total Paid'
4. enter 1/1/07 and 12/31/07 as your start and end dates; you should be using 'Date of Payment'
5 - if you have payments that are not donations, or that you handle by some other means, i.e. event admission, large foundation grants, 'pass thru' gifts from groundspring, etc., you can exclude them as needed. Usually this is done by just clicking on 'Category' and checking 'Include all gift categories.'
6 - click 'search'
7 - click on 'Save This Data...'
8 - under 'details' to the right of the results, click on 'excel/csv'
9 - now you have two options to make this into a spreadsheet... one option is to right click on the report and choose 'Export to Microsoft Excel'. This option works if you have Microsoft Office. If you do not have office then just click the Export button, choose a location on your computer you can remember, and click Save.

You can now use this data to generate your letters. First, if you can open the file in Excel (Open Office also works) do this:

1. Fix the data by removing any donors of less than $250 for the year. (Some groups may elect to mail to everyone on the list, to remind donors what they did.)
2. Fix the zip code column by selecting it, then right clicking, select Format Cells, then double click on 'special' to format this as a 'zip code' (works in Word 97/2000)
3. Save the data file as a real Excel (.xls) file by going to File -> Save As... -> Save as Type -> Microsoft Excel Workbook

Now we need our letter -- the "main document" we want to merge.

We have a sample main document that you may download at:
http://organizersdb.org/files/jan15merge.doc

You should customize it and save it on your computer. While you have this file open, you should be able to use the mail merge feature on your word processing program to select the data file saved in step A 4.

Once this is done you can click the Merge... button and choose to merge your thank you letters to a "new document."

D - Customize and Print

Individually go in and edit (or delete) letters as needed before printing them onto your letterhead (or if you add a simple letterhead in step B you could just print the letters onto plain paper.

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