Thank-you letters that remember the last one

Small organisations fall behind on thank-you letters. Not because they don't care. A gift comes in on a busy week, the letter waits, and three weeks later it feels late to send.

Gifts without a letter

Kamali now lists every gift that hasn't been thanked yet, one line per funder. The letter for each is written from the last letter the organisation sent to that funder: the same address block, the same signers, amounts written the way they write them, the same du or Sie. Earlier letters are examples of style, never a source of facts. Each costs about a tenth of a cent.

It goes out by email or by post. A posted letter's copy is saved back to the shared drive, which is also how Kamali knows it was sent. A letter sent some other way can be marked as sent.

Their rules, not mine

Using it with the team corrected me twice. The letter that answers a gift isn't always called a thank-you, and my classifier had filed one kind as an invoice. And one filed letter can answer several gifts, so it's one line, not three. There's no need to match each gift to a letter exactly; what matters is that nobody waits too long.

For post, a real Word letter of theirs is the template, logo and optional signatures included.