Templates Overview
Templates in DonorDock help your organization save time, communicate efficiently, and maintain consistent donor communications by letting you create reusable emails, letters, receipts, and acknowledgments. Merge tags keep those communications personalized by automatically pulling in information from DonorDock, such as a donor's name, gift details, organization information, or other record data when the template is generated.
How Templates Help Your Organization | |
Save time | Create frequently used communications once and reuse them whenever needed instead of starting from scratch. |
Maintain consistency | Give your team a standard set of communications that follow your organization's preferred messaging, branding, and formatting. |
Personalize communications | Use merge tags to automatically populate contact, gift, organization, and other record information when you generate a template. |
Automate donor stewardship | Set templates to send automatically in response to donations made through Giving Pages or use them as scheduled steps within Automations. |
Send bulk communications | Use Marketing templates to send newsletters, appeals, announcements, and other bulk emails through Outreach. |
Support individual outreach | Use templates when sending individual emails or creating letter activities so team members can quickly start with approved messaging. |
Standardize gift acknowledgments | Use Transactional templates for receipts, thank-you communications, pledge reminders, and other communications tied to gift information. |
Templates are primarily created and designed using the DonorDock Template Editor, which is required for all email templates and can also be used to create print templates. For organizations that prefer to design certain print communications, such as letters, receipts, or envelopes, in Microsoft Word, DonorDock also allows you to upload DOCX files and use them as Print templates. A Word document cannot be uploaded for conversion for an email template.
Accessing the Templates Library
The Templates Library is your organization’s shared location for viewing and managing saved templates. You can access it from several areas of DonorDock depending on the type of communication you are working with. Marketing and Transactional templates are stored in separate tabs within the same library, and you can move between those tabs as needed.
Navigate to Outreach > Templates to open the Templates Library on the Marketing Templates tab.
Navigate to Transactions > Templates to open the Templates Library on the Transactional Templates tab.
Select the Settings Menu (grid icon) in the upper-right corner and choose Manage Templates to access the Templates Library directly.
No matter how you open the Templates Library, your organization’s saved templates remain available in this central location for creating, editing, organizing, testing, and future use.
Marketing and Transactional Templates
Marketing and Transactional templates appear in separate tabs in the Template Manager as they support different types of communication. Marketing templates support general donor outreach, while Transactional templates are tied to a specific gift or pledge and include gift-specific merge tags. Separating these template types keeps your template library organized and ensures the right options are available for each communication.
Marketing | General donor communications, including bulk emails, individual email activities, and letter activities. |
Transactional | Gift- or pledge-related communications, including receipts, acknowledgments, thank-you letters, and pledge reminders. Transactional templates also include gift-specific merge tags. |
💡 Template types cannot be changed later. A Marketing template cannot be converted to Transactional, and a Transactional template cannot be converted to Marketing. If you need the same design for another template type, create a new template.
Email and Print Templates
In addition to choosing a Template Type, each template also has an Output Type that determines how the communication will be used. Email templates are designed for digital communications sent through DonorDock and must be created in the DonorDock Template Editor. Print templates are designed for communications that will be printed or downloaded and may be created either in the Template Editor or by uploading a Microsoft Word document.
Digital communications sent through DonorDock. Email templates can include buttons, menus, videos, social links, and other email-specific content. Email templates are created in the DonorDock Template Editor. | |
Letters, receipts, envelopes, and other communications you want to print or download. Print templates can be created in the DonorDock Template Editor or uploaded as a Microsoft Word DOCX file. |
💡 An Email template cannot later be changed into a Print template, or vice versa. Create a new template if you need the communication available in another output format.
How Templates Work
Templates are created once and then saved for your team to reuse whenever the appropriate communication is needed. When creating a template, first define the communication type and how it will be delivered or generated, then build the content your team can reuse.
A typical new template creation workflow:
Select the Template Type
Create the template as either Marketing or Transactional based on how the communication will be used.
Choose the Output Type
Select Email for digital communications sent through DonorDock or Print for communications that will be printed or downloaded.
Create the template content
Email templates and most Print templates are built in the DonorDock Template Editor. Print templates may also be created in Microsoft Word and uploaded as a DOCX file.
Add personalization
Insert merge tags to automatically populate information such as donor names, contact details, gift information, organization details, or other available record data when you generate the template.
Review and test
Preview the template and use the available testing tools to confirm formatting, merge tags, links, images, and other content appear as expected.
Save the template
Once complete, the template remains available in the Template Manager for your team to use in the future.
Templates are shared across your DonorDock organization, allowing multiple team members to use the same approved communications. As your template library grows, you can use folders in the Template Manager to keep templates organized and easy to find.
Personalizing Templates with Merge Tags
Merge tags act as placeholders that let you add information stored in DonorDock automatically when you generate a template. For example, the merge tag {{donor.name}} will be replaced with the appropriate contact name when the communication is created, allowing one reusable template to produce personalized content for many different recipients.
Depending on the template type, merge tags can pull information from contact records, gift records, Organization Settings, custom fields, user email signatures, dates, and other available system information. This can help personalize everything from a greeting or address block to gift amounts, campaign information, receipt details, organization contact information, and signatures without requiring your team to manually update each communication.
Because merge tags pull information directly from DonorDock when the template is generated, the information that appears depends on the data available on the applicable record. Testing a template before using it can help confirm that merge tags are positioned correctly and produce the expected result.
💡 Gift-specific merge tags are available only on Transactional templates. Marketing templates can still use donor, organization, custom field, and other supported merge tags that are not tied to a specific gift.