When our organization sends membership acknowledgement letters, our tax statement includes the fair market value of the membership's benefits, not the tax deductible amount. We have been advised to not provide the tax deductible amount because we cannot provide "tax advice" on what the member should claim when completing their taxes. Altru does not currently have a way to pull the fair market value of all benefits for a membership program into acknowledgement letters. While there is a "Total" at the bottom of the benefits table on the membership page, this number cannot currently be pulled into a merge field. Because the tax deductible amount is a merge field, there is no reason the "Total," which is already calculated for you, should not be a merge field.
There is a merge field, called "Total Value" that exists, but this field only pulls one fair market value of one benefit in the membership program, and there is no way to customize which of the benefit values it pulls. This field pulls a random benefit value that is often different for each acknowledgement letter pulled. For example, I pulled acknowledgement letters for 5 Individual Level Memberships, and the "Total Value" pulled the fair market value of 3 different benefits for that membership level between the 5 letters I created. This merge field is essentially useless, given most membership levels have more than a single benefit.
All of this to say, that the "Total Value" merge field is currently unusable for any membership program that has more than one benefit, and there should be a merge field created for the "Total" dollar amount of all benefits within a membership program. For the organizations that do not report the tax deductible amount to their members, all acknowledgement letters pulled have to be edited manually to include the fair market value for each member. This is a very time consuming task, which I believe could be easily solved by creating a merge field that includes the "Total" number, which is already calculated in Altru on the membership program benefits page.
Please see the attached chat support conversation between myself and a very helpful Blackbaud agent that helped me work through this issue, and ultimately determine there is no current solution for our membership acknowledgement letter issue that I have described here.
Raiser's Edge has the option of listing total benefit amount. (We use it for fundraising luncheon reservations, as we have two ticket options with different goods an services amounts.) And it works well. I do not know why Altru cannot create the same merge field.