Updated Annual Statements feature now available

Little Green Light is pleased to announce the release of an update to our Annual Statements feature. Using this feature, LGL customers can quickly generate a “statement of giving” for all donors, which can be a great help to donors as they prepare their taxes. It’s important, of course, to wait until all 2022 gifts have been received and entered into your database, but once that’s done you can generate these statements in a jiffy.

This feature is available in the Fundraising > Acknowledgments area of any LGL account.

You can send annual statements via mail or email, depending on your preference as well as on the donors for whom you have mailing addresses and email addresses. Within the mailing segment, you can also choose to mail only to donors who gave above a certain threshold during the year. For example, you can send a physical annual statement mailing to donors who gave $250 or more during the year, but send email to everyone else.

Using a special merge field, the annual statement includes an itemized gift table. The gift table lists the date and deductible amount of each direct gift received during the year. You can choose to include columns for other gift attributes: campaign, fund, appeal, event, gift category, and payment type.

Sample annual statement

You can refer to this sample annual statement to get started on your own version. Customize the text to use your organization’s voice, and add your organization’s name, EIN, and address.

If you want to customize your annual statement

The Annual Statements feature is, by design, simple to use. This also means that it is limited in the number of options it supports. If you are looking to segment your donors in a more sophisticated way than what this feature provides, or if you need to add in-kind gifts to your annual statement, you can use the general mailing and email features in Little Green Light and customize those options as much as you like. You probably will want to employ LGL smart fields in these cases, which allow you to include customized gift sums and customized gift tables in your communications.

For a deeper dive

For a full description of the updated Annual Statements feature and how to use it, please see our Knowledge Base article Quickly generate a simple annual tax statement in your account. And for quick tips on sending effective statements to your donors, check out 3 things to keep in mind when you create annual gift statements.