Most of you are in the middle of Christmas preparations, but I know there are some of you already thinking about sending contribution statements in January. Your concern about making sure everything is lined up right is what makes you so valuable to your church's leadership environment.
I know this because there are members of our Churchteams staff that have the same gifts and calling. I've seen them thrive in preparing services and resources to help our churches succeed with excellence on detailed processes like managing data and sending out contribution statements.
So, I'm going to refer you to two excellent resources developed by these team members. The first one has become a staple monthly report that we email you to make sure your communication data (email addresses in particular) are correctly assigned.
Originally, Donna developed this to help make sure that contribution statements weren't accidentally emailed to the wrong people. The one for December was sent out last Thursday. All of them have the subject line, "Please review this list to make sure giving statements go to the right people."
That's a really clear subject line and the content of the email is just as clear. It does take a few minutes to digest and work on, but doing it gives you a great deal more confidence in your data and can eliminate calls to your finance office from frustrated donors. Here's a screen shot of that email. Click on it to view the video.
The second resource brings together scores of conversations and issues related to sending statements that all our team members have had through the years. From these discussions we've streamlined the steps to make the process as clear and accurate as possible.
Jennifer pulled them together into a Knowledge Base article called, "How do I send out contribution or giving statements in Churchteams." It will show you how to:
- Prepare your people and your data,
- Set the defaults for your preferred statement features, and
- Email and/or print your statements.
It also includes a 14 minute on-demand recording of the statements briefing we did in January, 2024. Financial and database admins have found these live interactions with our team really helpful, so we will offer Statements Briefings on January 9 and 14, 2025. Click here to register.
Hopefully, my timing on sending this out is a blessing to your church's financial admin leaders.
