Question

Photo of Rick Mead

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Email Contributions Statements?

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I am currently and arena user - we are looking seriously at ROCK as a replacement system. I like the contributions statement I have built on my computer using the PDF builder but it lives on the local computer with the statement generator and not on the server. In Arena my statement templates lived in the database so Arena could generate statements, password protect them and then email.  We mail statements at the end of the year but leadership wants statements to go out every quarter to update members on their giving.  I don't see a way to do this within Rock.  The statement generator gives me a single PDF which is exactly what I need in Janruary for printing statements.  Any help / information would be helpful.

EmailGiving
  • Photo of Jim Michael

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    Rock has no automated way to email statements, or encrypt them. It does however have an online contribution statement block that lets a user see their current YTD (or prior years) statements within the giving portal. Unlike generating a PDF, it uses customizable lava to determine the layout, so you can adjust it however you want. 

    So, you could consider sending out your quarterly emails with a simple link to the page that holds the giving history on the public web site (behind user authentication, of course). I actually think that's a lot cleaner than emailing a password protected attachment. 

  • Photo of Elaine Lohroff

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    Has this situation changed since 7 years ago?  We are moving from Arena to Rock and just asked Chip how to email statements. Chip said I can download a pdf of my statements, which can then be emailed but we currently email out about 2000 password-protected statements.  I'm not keen on manually emailing those to everyone.  Way too much chance for error.

  • Photo of Jim Michael

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    Rock can now generate a PDF you can mail (via a workflow), but it’s not password protected as far as I know. 


    Emailing PDFs to people is a very old school way of doing things. It’s much more common to send an email with a special authenticated link that gives the recipient access to their statement.

    Here’s an example recipe on how to set that up  

     https://community.rockrms.com/recipes/20/email-your-contribution-statements-

  • Photo of Elaine Lohroff

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    That seems like a great solution.  It felt to me like the "recommended" solution from Rock was print and mail statements, which feels like a step backward.

    • Jim Michael

      Jim Michael

      Yeah, by default the docs do only highlight the traditional “print and mail them”) Contribution Statement Generator (which a shocking number of churches still seem to do), but because of Rock’s extensibility there are lots of other options.


      Thats something you’ll come to find with Rock.. that there are often 10 ways to accomplish what you want, each with pros and cons and (often) none of them “the absolute right way”

    • Photo of Tina Reusch

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      Hi Rick! With Rock there are always multiple ways of doing things. When I worked at my church, we came up with a way to email out statements as often as we wanted and to direct users to their MyAccount pages to be able to pull their statements any time they wanted one.

      Now that I am with 9 Embers (Rock Partner) we have helped a number of clients set up getting their giving statements into the hands of their givers. If you decide to make the move to Rock you will be able to get statements into the hands of your givers.

      You can look at this Recipe from Ben Murphy, who works at Simple. (Simple is one of the payment gateway options for Rock.) (Recipe Link)

      Ben's recipe might look a little intimidating right now, because you aren't familiar with Rock yet. But I assure you, it is a great start to getting statements when/where you want them. And, you can customize Ben's solution to fit your needs. And, if you decide to make the move to Rock, 9 Embers would love to help you get things up and running. You can use our Contact Us page to speak to one of our implementation specialists. We'd love to partner with you if you decide to make the switch!