I thought this should be fairly straightforward, but I can't figure out how to do it.  How do you get the current date inserted into a merge field in an Email template?

I administer a nonprofit implementation of salesforce.  I am triyng to compile an email template including the contact deatils and the donation made from this year's campaign.  How do I create a template that includes contact information and the amount of a specific donation?

I have a contact list (Excel) to import that has organization affiliations and donation hiatory in the spreadsheet cells.  When importing contacts, related object fields are not available to be picked as import destinations.  Is there a way of automatically importing these data, or do they need to be entered manually.