INTRO

Today many RockRMS churches don’t think much about the yearly contribution statements until the end of the year. For others, sending out contribution statements is a quarterly activity and it’s much more “top of mind”. Other than panic, what do we typically do in late December and early January when it comes time to create these statements? That’s right, we point to one of the most often referenced RockRMS recipes created by non-other than Jim Michael from The Crossing. Why not instead build your team out a Contributions Hub that gives you everything needed in one place to avoid the year-end scramble?

Contribution Statements Hubs from Harvest Bible Chapel Pittsburgh North on Vimeo.

Let's Get Started!

PREREQUISITES

Ensure that your entire finance team and leadership are aligned on the way that giving is reported for individuals and families on a per year or quarterly basis. Have meetings to define the requirements and ensure that everyone fully understands the process.

Discuss how your church would like to communicate the contribution statements. As more and more members are giving online, receiving electronic giving statements is becoming the common practice as well as saving the church time and money in production of physical mailed statements each year. You may choose to create a Person Attribute field type of Boolean to track those individuals that absolutely must receive a physical contribution statement for any given reason that you or they define.

The process will differ from church to church so having a solid grasp of what you need will help you out when building the Contribution Statements Hub.

In order to set up these report pages in order to quickly set up and send your contribution statements you’ll want to be familiar with the following utilities within RockRMS:

• Data Views and Reports
• Merge Document Template (Word Doc, example attached to this recipe)
  
• Email Communications Template (Wizard based template, code provided below)
• CMS Configuration / Pages / HTML Block
• (optional) Blue Moon Studio's Data Toolkit (use full SQL queries to return Data View results)

DOCUMENTATION

Before we dive into it, let’s familiarize ourselves with some of the prerequisite items and the documentation on their use:

• Data Views and Reports: https://community.rockrms.com/documentation/bookcontent/6/220
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/reporting/data-view-overview
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/reporting/reports
• Merge Documents: https://community.rockrms.com/documentation/bookcontent/9/224#mergedocuments
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/individuals-in-rock/merge-documents
• Email Templates: https://community.rockrms.com/documentation/bookcontent/34/230
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/communication/communication-templates
• CMS Configuration: https://community.rockrms.com/Rock/BookContent/14
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/cms/adding-pages-and-blocks-legacy
  (video) https://community.rockrms.com/rocku/cms/html-block

LET'S DIVE IN!

CMS PAGE-TREE SETUP

1. Go to Admin Tools - CMS Configuration - Pages
2. Create the suggested Child-Pages under the Finance - Administration tree:
   Note: You may want to set one report sub-page first and include the appropriate HTML and Dynamic Data blocks so they can be quickly copied and updated.
   1. Contribution Statements
      1. Electronic Preferred
         1. Email (All)
         2. Physical Mailing (No Email)
      2. Physical Mailing Preferred
         1. Physical Mailing (All)
         2. Email (NO Address Available)
      3. Non-Receipted Charitable Giving / Non-Cash Asset Giving
         1. Email (All)
         2. Physical Mailing (All)
            
            
   2. Include (3) Page Menu blocks on the Contribution Statements page:
   1. Include this code in the Lava Template field:

      % include '~~/Assets/Lava/PageListAsBlocks.lava' %

   2. Set the Root page to each of the following sub-pages:
      1. Electronic Preferred
      2. Physical Mailing Preferred
      3. Non-Receipted Charitable Giving (optional)
   3. Add some description to the Page Menu block Advanced Settings Pre-HTML field to make each area stand out:
   1. On the Electronic Preferred Page Menu block:
      <h4><i class="fa fa-truck"></i> Physical Mailing Communication Preferred</h4>
      <p>For sending contribution statements for any givers with a valid home address. Emailing the remaining contributors without a home address.</p>
   2. On the Electronic Preferred Page Menu block:
      <h4><i class="fa fa-piggy-bank"></i> Email Non-receipted Charitable Statements</h4>
      <p>For sending non-receipted charitable statements for any givers with a valid email address.</p>
      
      

REPORT SETUP

The report pages can be created based on your church’s needs regarding giving. You may utilize Data Views and Reports or the Dynamic Data Block with a SQL query for each of the contribution sub-pages.

Detailing out the numerous ways to create these reports would be too exhaustive for the purposes of this recipe. If you need personal assistance in creating the necessary DVs/Reports or Dynamic Data Block SQL Queries please contact me via the Community RockChat.

Note: If you want to focus on a select list of givers for Physical Mailing statements then you must build out a Data View due to the nature of the Statement Generator and it's reliance on Data Views.

1. Go to Admin Tools - CMS Configuration - Pages
2. Edit one of the new report pages that exist under this new Contributions Hub page tree
   
   
3. Add and HTML Block to the main page zone and add in:
   1. A description of the report and it’s intended purpose
   2. An accordion lava shortcode for a How-to section to remind existing or train new finance team member(s) on the process of creating the contribution statements
   3. Links to the Data View and Report that is being referenced below
4. Add a Dynamic Report or Dynamic Data Block to the main page zone
   1. Select the Report or add in your SQL query accordingly

DATA VIEW TIPS & TRICKS

1. Last Year Giving
   
   
2. Current Year Giving
   
   
3. Helper DVs:
   If you don’t already have these somewhere from another communications project, you’ll need a few Data Views to find all person records with valid and active email addresses, as well as mailing addresses that are not blank and those that are blank in order to populate which lists of people you can send electronic statements to versus those that you must physically mail out statements to because of the missing email on their record. Setting up these helper emails will let you mix and match between building out contribution statement lists of people for emailing all or emailing only those that don’t have a physical mailing address. And that also goes for being able to build out a contribution statement list of people for physically mailing all or mailing only those persons that don’t have an email address on their record.
   
   
   
   1. Link the Location (address not blank) DV to the Person DV:
      
      
      
      
      
4. Email (ALL):
   
   
5. Physical Mailing (ALL):
   1. Block Title with a value of Date Range Selection, you can choose to turn off the Block Title
   2. Start Date with a key of StartDate and field type of DATE
   3. End Date with a key of EndDate and field type of DATE

FINAL THOUGHTS

I hope this gave you some ideas on how to create a hub to make the end of year scramble less like eggs and more like a piece of cake!

Some interesting thoughts on thanking new givers:

Automate First Gift Thank-you Email (RockRMS Recipe)

Donors Need to be Thanked: Outrageous Donor Service, Part 4

Seven Ways to Thank Donors to the Church

Donor Thank-You Letter Templates