You can email the built-in or mail-merged receipts to those donors for whom you have entered an email address in the Donor Details area. You can also email statements , and any letters created with the Letters menu options.
Before you can do any of this, you need to configure email sending from the program, via the Maintenance à Email Sending Configuration menu option.
Before emailing receipts, you will also want to specify a scanned signature bitmap to go on the receipts, since obviously you can't sign them by hand!
Once you have created receipts with options such as Receipt à Current Donor Original, or recreated them with an option such as Receipt à Reprint Range or Letters à Mass Mailing, you will see a button on the built-in receipt viewing window labelled Email/Print. In the mail merge editor for any letters or statements, the emailing is done with the File à Email/Print menu option, and a corresponding toolbar button. (You can also use Receipt à Current Donor Sample for testing - receipts created with that option are always emailed to yourself, rather than to the donor.)
The "statement" reports Reports à Donation à Details, One Page per Donor and Category Totals, One Page per Donor, and the Total Donations information and Pledge information mail merges which can be used as statements, can also be sent by email, using the same menu options or buttons.
Warning: Sending mass emails from any program can be unreliable, and one user has reported that after sending some receipt emails created with Receipt à All Donors, the email-sending job hung part way through, he had to kill the program, and it didn't save his receipts. To avoid this, you may want to save the receipts first, by using Save PDF to save them to a PDF file, and then closing the receipt-viewing window. Then, re-display those receipts with Receipt à Reprint Range, and only then use the Email/Print button to email them. That way, even if the email-sending job hangs, your receipts are already saved, and you can just try again with Reprint Range again, picking the range that has not yet been sent.
After clicking the Email/Print button or menu option, the program checks to see whether any of the donors whose receipts or statements are displayed have email addresses. If none of them do, you just get a message and nothing further is done.
If some of the donors for the displayed receipts or statements have email addresses and some of them don't, a window like the following will then be displayed:
Normally you would leave the default first radio button selected, and press Enter or click OK. However, there may be situations where you want to use the other options, including cases where you tried this before, the email sending failed but the printing was successful, and you want to try only the emails again.
If all of the donors for the displayed receipts or statements have email addresses, the above window is not displayed, and the program will always try to email to all of the donors. (If there is more than one receipt or statement displayed when this is the case, a message is shown to inform you that none of them need to be printed.)
Next, the following window comes up to confirm the Subject line and Body of the email that will be sent to the donors, with the receipt or statement attached as a PDF file:
The From Name and Email address in this window will be your name and email address, as configured in Maintenance à Email Sending Configuration. The signature block at the end of the Body will be based on what you have entered in Maintenance à Organization Info. However, you can edit the Subject line and Body to be however you want them to be. The Body is just plain text, so you cannot include fonts or images. Your edits to the Subject and Body will be saved for the next time you email receipts or statements. Please note that once they have been saved once, even if you change the organization info in Maintenance à Organization Info, the signature block in the Body will not change - you will have to also change it there, the next time you email receipts or statements.
After clicking OK in that window, the program will start to create PDF files for each receipt or statement for each donor that has an email address, then send those as an email attachment, with the Subject line and Body you specified in the window above. (Of course, if you selected to skip sending emails, and only print, in the first window above, this step will not be done.)
Next, after a message telling you how many emails were sent, unless you specified to skip the printing for donors without email addresses in the first window above, it will print those ones to your printer. Obviously, those ones then need to be mailed out or distributed directly to the donors as usual.
There is one tricky part about the ones to be printed to your printer, when you are using mail merge receipts or statements. For technical reasons, when the Print dialog box comes up, the program is unable to automatically change the default printer back from the novaPDF printer used to create the PDF files to your regular printer. You will have to select the correct real printer, before clicking Print. This is not a problem when you are using the built-in receipts or statements.
You also need to pay careful attention to any email receipts that bounce back to you, due to bad email addresses for the donors etc., or ones you receive error messages about during the emailing process. Those donors will thus not have received their receipts, and you will want to print and send them normally. (Or, contact the donor, obtain a corrected email address for them, and re-send them by email.) You can reprint a receipt that bounced back with the Receipt à Reprint Range menu option. This issue with bounced emails is not as big a deal with statements, because it's not crucial that donors receive their statements.
Warning about being classified as a SPAMmer!
If you have very large numbers of donors with email addresses that you send receipts or statements to, it is possible that either your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or the ISPs of the recipients of your emailed receipts or statements will classify you as a spammer, when you send lots of emails very quickly as the program can do. This is a general problem with sending large numbers of mass emails, and is very hard to work around.
It is impossible to give a specific number of emails at which this might start being a problem. In my experience sending emails to the users of the DONATION program, I started observing the problem when I had a few thousand users. But I would guess that the problem could start when you email quickly to as few as a thousand donors.
There is unfortunately no simple way to get around this problem. (I get around it by using a commercial mass email sending service, that works closely with all ISPs to ensure that their emails are not classed as SPAM. But you couldn't use an email-sending service to send the emails containing a different receipt or statement for each donor.) So, if you do have very large numbers of donors with email addresses, you may want to think carefully about whether or not to use this feature for emailing receipts or statements.
One thing that might help would be to email the receipts or statements in smaller batches, and only do a certain number per day. The program will only generate receipts in batches of 500 anyways, so you might do one of those batches per day, when you are generating the year-end receipts. I cannot in any way guarantee that this will prevent you from being classified as a spammer, but it makes sense that it might help.
One specific point is that if you use Yahoo Mail, and have subscribed to their Mail Plus service, and use plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com as the SMTP Server, there is a hard limit of 500 emails sent per day. Anything beyond this will be rejected as SPAM. So doing as suggested in the previous paragraph (only one batch of 500 receipts per day, at the year-end) would be a perfect solution.
If you do have large numbers of donors with email addresses, one thing you could do is to talk to your ISP about their sending limits for emails with attachments. Ask what quantities per day or hour you need to limit yourself to, to prevent your ISP classifying you as a spammer, and adjust your email sending of receipts accordingly.
Handling halts in the emailing
If your Internet Service Provider, through which you are sending the emails, immediately reports back to the email software used by DONATION that one of the email addresses you are sending to is invalid, you will get an error message and the process will halt. If you are doing a mass email, this could be a problem, because you need to fix it (if possible) and resume sending later at the same or following email.
So the first thing you do is exit the statement or receipt window, and fix that email address on DONATION's main window, or remove the email address. Then recreate the mail merge or report that you want to send by email.
If it was a mail merge that you were trying to email, created with the Letters à Mass Mailing menu option, use the checkbox in section 2 of the Merge Letters window to Filter the data before merging it. After clicking Merge, check the sort order in the displayed data (it will usually be by last name then first name), and devise a filter to resume at the desired person. (See Filtering Reports for details.) For instance, to resume at "Cooperstock, Dan", use the filter:
lastname >= "Cooperstock"
That works if there was only one Cooperstock, or none with first names alphabetically before "Dan". Otherwise, if there was another Cooperstock with a first name before "Dan", that you wanted to exclude, use:
lastname > "Cooperstock" or (lastname = "Cooperstock" and firstname >= "Dan")
Click OK in the Filter window to display just those donors that satisfy the Filter condition, then click OK in that data viewing window to do the merge. You can then resume emailing.
The approach with something that isn't a mail merge is basically the same - the Statement reports are also in order by last name then first name, so you can use the same sort of Filter. And receipts are usually ordered by receipt number, so if you are using say Receipt à Reprint Range, just specify a range of receipt numbers that starts at the correct point.
Emailing receipts or statements only to yourself, for testing
You should probably test this feature for emailing receipts or statements out first, before actually emailing them to the donors. To do that, go to the Maintenance à Receipt Options window, and check the "Email receipts only to yourself, for testing" checkbox. Having done that, create (or recreate) receipts or statements, and select the Email/Print button or toolbar icon on the window they come up in. All displayed receipts or statements for donors that have email addresses will be emailed to your own email address (as set in Maintenance à Email Sending Configuration) rather than to the donors' actual email addresses. (However, they will say they were sent to the donor's name, to help you identify who would have gotten what if you weren't using this option.) Also, when that option is selected, the receipts or statements for donors without email addresses will not be printed, and the first window above, prompting for whether to email and/or print, will not be displayed. (They are not printed because you are doing this run only to test the email sending, so it would just be a waste of paper!)
Sample receipts are also always only emailed to yourself.
Concerns for Canadian Users
In the Canada Revenue Agency's page on Computer-generated Receipts, there is some discussion of sending receipts by email. Here are the most relevant sections:
9. Registered charities sending official donation receipts by e-mail on the Internet should ensure that the receipts are in read only or non-editable format. The recipient donor should only be able to read and print the receipt. The intent is to safeguard registered charities against fraud, for example, by preventing a donor from changing the amount on the receipt.
10. Computer software is available for registered charities to protect their receipts from hackers during the transmission. Charities can use a secure electronic signature, which means that the document is encrypted and signed with an electronic signature such as entrust technology. The receipt would then be generally safe from outside hackers or the recipient would know if someone had altered the contents of the receipt that was sent. The use of the secure electronic signature should be kept under the control of a responsible individual authorized by the registered charity.
PDF files are generally considered to be read-only, and DONATION does encrypt the PDF receipts and reports it creates, which means that although they can be read by the recipients without knowing any password, they cannot be modified in any way unless you know the password, which I do not give out!
However, I do not currently protect PDF receipts with a secure electronic signature, which would verify that they had not been tampered with in any way. (This is a different issue from the bitmap signature that you add to the receipts, which is also required.) Fortunately, the CRA's point (10) above only says that charities "can" do this, it does not make it mandatory.