Letters sent to donors

Hi Joan! Are you looking at Direct Mail letters, acknowledgments, or email? 

Direct mail acknowledgments

Hi ​@JOAN JOHNSON! Are you referring to merge fields? When you use Direct Mail Acknowledgments, there are two date options:

1. Today’s date *|TODAYS_DATE|*
2. Donation date *|DONATION_DATE|*

If you are seeing today’s date, you just need to change your merge field to Donation Date! See the image below for where to find the merge field you need!

If I’m misunderstanding your question, please let me know!

I’m going to jump in here with an issue that I have, that I think might be the same one that Joan is having. Once a letter is sent/marked as acknowledged, we should be able to view the version that was mailed, not a version with active merge fields that will update constantly. To give an example:

I thank a donor on December 2nd, 2025 for a gift they made the day previously. I use *|TODAYS_DATE|* as a merge field to date the letter (to show when I sent the direct mail acknowledgement to the donor). That donor then reaches out in March to say that they’ve misplaced the letter and would like a copy, or they never received the letter, or whatever the case may be. I go into that direct mailing, but because of the merge fields, it updates to the March date rather than the original date the letter was sent.

For another example of the merge fields causing this issue:

We have a contact, Joe Smith, as a local foundation - Community Foundation. He is our primary contact for years, and so all direct mail goes to him. Joe retires and is replaced by Ashley Doe - who is now our primary contact moving forward. We change the way we address letters and greetings to make sure mail goes to Ashley now.  An auditor comes in and asks to see an acknowledgement letter we sent last year, when Joe was still there. When I go into that letter to print it, because the merge fields are still active, it updates the address and greeting to Ashley rather than Joe. 

In other systems I’ve used, the final letter was accessible as a PDF rather than an editable document, so that this information was not changing regardless of if there were merge fields present. 

Amelia, This is exactly the issue I have.

​@Amelia Leggett ​@JOAN JOHNSON - Thank you for clarifying! I shared this with our Senior Product Manager. He confirmed that this is currently the expected behavior. But! Amelia’s example did a great job of breaking it down for him, and he agreed that it’s something we’ll need to implement.

Thank you, Charles! 

This would be such a helpful fix!! It’s been a frustrating problem for a long time, and thank you Amelia for so clearly laying out why it’s extremely problematic, a PDF save of that moment of the sent letter/email would be tremendously more useful