Being attentive to donor concerns is part of the strategy at the V Foundation, which was founded by ESPN and legendary basketball coach Jim Valvano in 1993. The Foundation has always sent acknowledgment letters in response to donations, but it knew that donors, especially donors who gave repeatedly throughout the year, wanted comprehensive year-end statements with tables that itemized and totaled their annual contributions. Such statements would make donor recordkeeping easier, as well as making it easier for donors to claim appropriate charitable deductions for income tax returns.
The native tools in the Salesforce solution that the V Foundation used didn’t support that need, according to Michaela Johnson-Tena, Senior Director of Operations at V Foundation. And with just three staffers in the Donor Services department to serve a large and growing donor base, the Foundation couldn’t expect the staffers to crank out these letters manually. It needed another solution.
After considering a range of options, the V Foundation chose Nintex DocGen® for Salesforce. The Nintex solution works behind the scenes to automatically populate Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF templates with data from Salesforce and other systems. It eliminates the need to manually create contracts, work orders, invoices, and other business-critical documents, and builds and shares documents with just a few clicks from directly within Salesforce or Office 365.
Easy to adopt, easy to use
The V Foundation found the solution as easy to adopt as it is to use – implementing Nintex Document Generation internally, with assistance from Nintex Support as needed, in just a few weeks.
To create and send donor letters, Johnson-Tena and her colleagues select one of 15 custom templates in Word—some include language on specific benefits, others refer to tributes, non-deductible contributions, and so on—and the particular donor file in Salesforce. The template pulls in donor information from Salesforce, merges fields, and produces a letter and envelope ready for review and mailing.
The Foundation creates and sends several thousand year-end donor contribution letters each week throughout January, and several hundred to several thousand other letters per week during the rest of the year.
