Final step: Marking your acknowledgment mailing "Sent"

In this article:

What is an acknowledgment mailing “batch”?

When an acknowledgment template is assigned via the gift entry process, it moves an acknowledgment letter into a "batch" or "queue" in the Mailings > Acknowledgments area. The batch stays open until it is manually marked as "Sent". It is not marked “Sent” automatically once the letter(s) are downloaded.

Why do I need to mark my acknowledgment mailing batch “Sent”?

When you have printed your acknowledgment letters, stuffed your envelopes or stuck on your labels, and gotten those letters out in the mail, your final step in the acknowledgment process is to close out your mailing. You do this by marking it “Sent”.

This is a necessary step because each time you attach an acknowledgment template to a gift, a new acknowledgment letter is generated and added to the current batch. If you don’t mark your mailing for the sent letters as sent, LGL won’t know those acknowledgments are no longer active and a new acknowledgment letter will be added to that batch the next time you attach an acknowledgment template to a gift. This can cause gift data to be excluded from a letter, among other problems.

To mark your acknowledgment mailing “Sent”, go to Mailings > Acknowledgments > Ack. Letters, and under the Status column, set the mailing to “Sent”:

What if I didn’t mark my last acknowledgment mailing “Sent” but I have assigned my ack. template to more gifts?

If there are more acknowledgment mailing recipients in your acknowledgments batch than you expect, it’s likely that one or more of your previous mailings were not marked “Sent”.

If you know that the previous acknowledgment letters were printed and sent, you can change the status to "Sent" and the batch will close and move into the Sent mailings tab.

If you have already added letters to the old batch and now it includes old letters plus new letters, the way to fix this is to remove the acknowledgment template from the gifts whose acknowledgments have not yet been sent.

Here’s a screenshot showing a mailing (letters have been sent but the mailing was not marked “Sent”) before the acknowledgment template was added to more gifts. There are currently 3 recipients for this acknowledgment mailing:

Here’s the mailing after the acknowledgment template is added to additional gifts. You can see that there are now 6 gifts (we added 3):

To fix this issue, find the gifts you added the acknowledgment template to (which have not had a letter sent for them yet) and remove the acknowledgment template from each. You can do this manually by going to the gift, hovering over the name of the acknowledgment template, and clicking the red “x” to remove it:

Or, if you can search on the gifts (go to the Fundraising tab to search for them), you can remove the acknowledgment template from within the search results by hovering over and clicking the red “x” for each one:

Once you have removed the acknowledgment template from the current gifts, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Mailings > Acknowledgments > Ack. Letters
  2. Make sure the "Recipients" number updates to what it should be for the acknowledgment mailing
  3. Mark your acknowledgment mailing “Sent”

Now you can re-add the acknowledgment template to the gifts you want to acknowledge. You can do this from the gift records themselves, or you can add the acknowledgment template one by one or in bulk from Mailings > Acknowledgments > Ack. Letters > Unacknowledged Gifts: