1. Background

1. Our organisation processes a significant volume of donations through Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT. Currently, AI Acknowledgements require users to review and send each acknowledgement individually. There is no functionality to automatically trigger acknowledgement emails when a gift batch has been committed.

2. This results in substantial manual work for the Fund Administration team, particularly when processing high volumes of donations, and limits the operational efficiency that system automation could provide.

2. Requested Enhancement

1. We would like Blackbaud to introduce an automated donation acknowledgement workflow that triggers acknowledgement emails automatically upon successful commitment of a gift batch, without requiring users to process each gift acknowledgement individually.

2. The proposed functionality should include:

a) Automatic triggering: Once a gift batch has been committed successfully, the system automatically initiates the acknowledgement process for eligible gifts within that batch.

b) Automated email generation and sending: The system generates and sends acknowledgement emails using predefined, approved email templates, without requiring manual review and sending of each individual acknowledgement.

c) Eligibility rules: The system sends acknowledgements only to eligible gifts with valid donor email addresses, while excluding gifts that require special handling, lack necessary information, or should not receive an email acknowledgement.

d) Duplicate prevention: The system checks whether an acknowledgement has already been sent to prevent duplicate emails.

e) Processing status and exception reporting: Users can view the acknowledgement status of each gift and identify unsuccessful deliveries, missing donor information, or other exceptions requiring follow-up.

f) Audit trail: The system records the acknowledgement date, delivery status, and relevant processing details for monitoring and audit purposes.

3. Alternative Solution

If automatic triggering upon gift batch commitment is not currently technically feasible, we would appreciate Blackbaud recommending an alternative workflow that achieves the same objective of minimising manual intervention.

For example, the system could provide a configurable automated workflow that triggers acknowledgements when gifts are approved or committed, or allows users to initiate automated processing for an entire committed batch in a single action.

A bulk review and send function could also be considered as an interim improvement, although our preferred solution is full automation.

4. Business Benefits

The proposed enhancement would:

1. Significantly reduce manual processing time and repetitive administrative work.

2. Improve the timeliness and consistency of donor acknowledgements.

3. Reduce the risk of human error and duplicate acknowledgements.

4. Strengthen operational controls through automated status tracking and exception reporting.

5. Allow Fund Administration staff to focus on donation reconciliation, exception handling, and other value-added activities.

5. Expected Outcome

We would appreciate Blackbaud considering this enhancement to enable donation acknowledgements to be automatically generated and sent upon successful commitment of gift batches, subject to predefined eligibility rules and controls.

This functionality would significantly improve operational efficiency for organisations handling substantial donation volumes and eliminate the need to process routine acknowledgement emails gift by gift.