Donation Acknowledgement Email Template

The Donation Acknowledgement email is a ready-made Dotdigital email template you can use to thank your customers after they make a Donation.

The Donation Acknowledgement email template uses liquid script to dynamically display information about your customer’s Donation from Spektrix and can be sent using a Customer List Schedule.

Before you start, you should be familiar with:

Customer List Schedules

Why send a Donation Acknowledgement email?

Thanking donors promptly shows your appreciation and reinforces the positive impact of their support. A well-timed acknowledgement can strengthen your relationship with your customers and encourage future giving.

Using the Donation Acknowledgement email template, you can:

Create a branded Donation thank you email.
Display the customer's Donation details including Donation amount, date and Fund name.
Include a Gift Aid ask to customers who have not yet completed a Gift Aid Declaration (UK only).
Provide an editable Donation Summary, including information such as receipt number, Fund name, Acknowledgement and Confirmation Text.
Include any extra information you’d like to share about your organisation’s fundraising, such as details of your organisation will benefit from the Donation.

How does it work?

There are two versions of the Donation Acknowledgement email template, designed for different regions:

UK: includes a Gift Aid messaging section.
International template (Ireland, Canada, US, Australia and New Zealand): replaces the Gift Aid section with an optional Donation summary.

Both templates use the Donation Acknowledgement Header block which you can use to create your own Donation email if you do not want to use the template. The Donation Acknowledgement Header powers the Liquid Script in the email which means you can use Donation information in advanced personalisation and decisions.

The templates handle two scenarios:

Donations to a single Fund: Displays the Fund name and the total amount donated.
Donations to multiple Funds: Displays the combined Donation total without listing individual Fund names.

How to set up the Donation Acknowledgement email

Before starting, you’ll need:

A synced address book
Dotdigital Order Syncing activated on your system

Complete the following steps to set up your Donation Acknowledgement email:

Create the email campaign
Configure the Donation Acknowledgement template
Add your organisation’s custom content and branding
Test your email
Set up and activate your Customer List Schedule

TIP: This article explains how to set up Donation Acknowledgement emails using the ready-made template. If you’d prefer to use your own template, you can build your own email using the Donation Acknowledgement Header block and writing your own liquid script personalisation and decisions.

1. Create the email campaign

In Dotdigital, set up an email campaign using the Donation Acknowledgement template:

Go to Campaigns > Email > New campaign
Under Custom Templates, click on the Shared Templates folder
Select the appropriate Donation Acknowledgement template for your region:
Give your email campaign a memorable and descriptive name
Click Continue
In the Campaign Details section of your email, set the From Name and Reply to address with details of a member of your Fundraising team.

2. Configure the Donation Acknowledgement Template

You can customise your Donation Acknowledgement email to:

Display different Donation information
Include a conditional Gift Aid message (UK only)
Include a Donation Summary (International template, UK optional)

Take a look at the numbered image and the corresponding table below to learn more:

Number	What is it?
1	Acknowledgement Header. The Donation Acknowledgement Header block determines which Donations are included in the email. For steps on how to configure the header block, go to the Donation Acknowledgement Header section of this article.
2	Donation and funds message. This decision block displays the Donation amount and thank you message. In the When box, you can configure a message which will display to customers who have Donated to a single Fund. In the Otherwise box, you can configure a message which will display to customers who have Donated to more than one Fund. You can edit the text around the Liquid objects. You can also add other available Liquid Objects.
3	Gift Aid message (UK only). The UK version of the Donation Acknowledgement Email Template includes a Decision block that you can use to display a dynamic message based on whether or not the customer has declared the Donation as Gift Aid eligible. For steps on how to configure the Gift Aid message, go to the Gift Aid message section of this article.
4	Donation Summary (international template). The Donation Summary block can be configured to display the receipt number, Fund name, Acknowledgement and Confirmation Text. For steps on how to configure the Donation Summary, go to the Donation Summary section of this article.
5	Unsubscribe link. You must always include an unsubscribe link. You can add your organisation’s usual footer information at the bottom of this email.

Donation Acknowledgement Header

The Donation Acknowledgement Header block determines which Donations are included in the email.

To configure this block:

In the Dotdigital Easyeditor, click on the Acknowledgement Header block.
Enter a number in the Days since donation box. For example, set this to 1 to include customers who Donated yesterday:

Make a note of the number of days you use here as you’ll need to match this when you set up your Customer List to send the email.

WARNING: The Days since donation value must match the segmentation used in your Customer List. If these don't match, the email may display incorrect donation information or appear blank.

Gift Aid message (UK template only)

The UK version of the Donation Acknowledgement email template includes a Decision block that you can use to display dynamic messages based on whether or not the customer has declared the Donation as Gift Aid eligible.

Gift Aid eligible

In the first part of the decision block, you can enter a message to display to customers who have already completed a Gift Aid declaration, making their Donation Gift Aid eligible.

This section appears when a customer has completed the declaration. The decision reads When allGiftAidClaimable == true

Replace the content in this section with your organisation’s preferred messaging for customers who have already completed their declaration. Use it to thank the customer and explain the benefit you’ll receive from their Gift Aid:

No Gift Aid Declaration

In the second part of the decision block, in the Otherwise section, you can enter a message to display to customers who have not yet completed a Gift Aid declaration.

Replace the content in this section with your organisation’s preferred messaging for customers who have not completed a Gift Aid declaration. Use it to invite the customer to complete a retrospective Gift Aid declaration.
Update the link in the Update my Gift Aid Declaration button with a link to your Retrospective Gift Aid iframe. If you haven't set up the retrospective Gift Aid iframe yet, you can remove the Gift Aid section or replace the link with a link to your website until you're ready:

Donation Summary block

The Donation Summary block can be configured to display a receipt number, Fund name, Acknowledgement and Confirmation Text.

To add the Donation Receipt to your email, click into the block to configure the settings:

Background colour: Enter a hex code to set the receipt’s background colour.
Border colour: Enter a hex code to set a colour for the border.
Line colour: Enter a hex code to set a colour for the divider line.
Label colour: Enter a hex code to set the colour of labels such as Fund name.
Body text colour: Enter a hex code to set the colour of the body text.
Date format: Delete the default date format from the box to choose a different date format.
Receipt content: Check the boxes against each of the pieces of information you want to include. This data is dynamically generated from your Spektrix system.
- Receipt number: include a receipt number in the receipt.
- Fund name: display the Fund name of the Donation.
- Sequence ID: display the Donation Sequence ID.
- Acknowledgement: display the Donation Recognition if present.
- Confirmation text: if you use the Confirmation Text Fund Attribute, you can use the value to display a custom message here.
Style content: Click the Style Content button to update the style of the Block. The font size and colour of the text is set in the global style content for the email. Refer to the diagram to understand which style settings apply to different parts of the card.

Once you have finished, click Apply to save your changes.

3. Add your organisation’s custom content and branding

Next, add any design elements or custom content to the email.

You should amend the messaging in the email and apply your organisation’s brand elements and styling such as header and a footer. Do not edit or remove any of the custom blocks you have configured in the previous section. The Donation Acknowledgement Header must stay at the top of the email.

TIP: A compelling thank you message is a meaningful touch point to inform donors and let them know more about your organisation. If you are planning to use Contact Preferences to exclude customers who don’t want to receive marketing, you can use this email to upsell a recurring Donation or Membership.

Personalisation

Use these fields as personalisation in the body of your email to pull data directly from Spektrix.

For example, if you want to give the customer their Customer ID as a reference you could add {{ customerId }} to display this in the email.

Spektrix data	Liquid Script object
First name	{{ firstName }}
Last name	{{ lastName }}
Informal Salutation (to use the Liquid Object you will need to set up the Custom Data Field)	{{ informalSalutation }}
Customer ID	{{ customerId }}
Order ID	{{ orderId }}
Donation date in the timezone of your system	{{ donationDate }}
The number of Donations made by the customer within the time period specified in the Header block	{{ donationCount }}
Donation total	{{ donationTotal }}
Donation total already formatted in the currency of your system	{{ totalDonations }}
The name of the first Donation’s Fund	{{ fundName }}
Fund code from the first matching Donation	{{ fundCode }}
Date transaction confirmed	{{ accountingDate }}
Donation sequence ID from the first matching Donation	{{ donationSequenceId }}
The Donation addressee	{{ donationAddressee }}
Tribute or acknowledgement type, when present.	{{ tributeType }}
Tribute or acknowledgement name, when present.	{{ tributeName }}

Decision blocks

You can use the following Liquid Script boolean objects in Decision blocks to show or hide content.

TIP: Boolean values (Yes / No values) should only be used in Decision Blocks and not as personalisation.

Decision blocks let you show content variations based on criteria (“When”) and an Otherwise default. Add one by dragging the Decision block into your email.

Create a When statement with Event/Instance Liquid objects and operators (e.g., ==, !=), then set the content for each variation and Otherwise.

Spektrix data	Liquid Script object variable
When the matching donations cover more than one Fund is Yes / No	{{ multipleFunds }}
When every matching donation is Gift Aid claimable is Yes / No	{{ allGiftAidClaimable }}

Fund specific decisions

To display a different message to customers based on the Fund they have donated to, you can add this to your email using decisions.

To create a decision, drag and drop the Decision block into the body of your email:

Click the New content link:

Enter your decision criteria by constructing a statement using the formula:

fund_name == "fundname"

Replace fundname with the name of your Fund exactly as it appears within Spektrix including spaces. For example, if my Fund is Summer Donations Drive, the decision criteria would be:

Fund_name == “Summer Donations Drive”

Enter this into the decision when box and click Apply:

You can add as many variations as you’d like to represent different Funds. If a customer has not donated to one of the Funds that is referenced, they’ll see the content you add in the Otherwise section. You can leave this blank to not display any message.

4. Test your email

Find a customer with a Donation that matches the time frame set in the Donation Acknowledgement Header. You may need to adjust the time frame if there are no recent Donations.

To preview, click Preview from the navigation menu.

Then, from the Campaign preview page select the Personalisation icon:

You’ll then be able to search for and choose a customer to preview the email as.

5. Set up and activate your Customer List Schedule

To create a Customer List Schedule to deliver your Donation Acknowledgement email, follow the steps below:

Create a new Customer List. Use the Pre-filter to decide who will receive your Donation Acknowledgement Email. You can choose to exclude anyone based on their behaviour. Consider excluding customers based on their Donation amount, Contact Preferences, Tags or prospecting status.

TIP: You can also use the Fund or the Amount metrics to limit which customers are included based on the Fund they have Donated to or the size of their Donation.
In the Main filter, create a new Local Segment. Use a Purchasing Segment then find the Donations wrapper and use the Date Transaction Confirmed metric set to Yesterday:
Define your Segment:
Drag your Local Segment into the Customer List and update the count to check your Customer List logic.
Save your Customer List.
Schedule the Customer List to run daily and link it to your email campaign in Dotdigital.

Reporting

To report on your Donation Acknowledgement email, you can:

Use the Campaign Report in Dotdigital to track opens, clicks, and delivery rates.
If you include a retrospective Gift Aid call to action, monitor whether donors are completing Gift Aid declarations after receiving the email. To do this you can run your Customer List through the Donations Report.
Review the Donation Analysis report in Spektrix to track the overall impact of your donor communications.