Here’s the situation:

You want to manually enter a donation you received by check—so that the donor gets a receipt and so that you can track this person’s giving.

You click the Manual Gift Entry button in your dashboard. But there’s a problem! You don’t have the donor’s email address, and the system requires a real email address! Here’s what we recommend…

Use your email address with a “+donor_name” before the @ sign. So, let’s say your email address is “Bob@amazingnonprofit.org” and the donor’s name is Mary Jane. Simply enter this as the email address:

Bob+Mary_Jane@amazingnonprofit.org

As mail providers will typically forward everything from “me+somejunk@xyz.com” to “me@xyz.com”, you are able to keep track of the donors separately in GivingTools while still sending receipts to a legitimate address! (In this case, your own.)

As you now have access to that donor’s personal account, if you ever figure out what their real email address is, you can login as the donor, go to their account, and update the email.