With Faithlife Giving, members of your finance team can customize your giving statements with custom text, links, images, files, and more. Additionally, you can automatically notify your givers when you publish statements, manually send email communication, or print giving statements for manual distribution for anyone without an email address.

You can customize giving statements on two levels:

• Global Statement Settings: Set your default statement setting for any newly published statement.
• Individual Statement Settings: Individual statement settings allow you to personalize individual statements when needed. Individual statement settings override the global statement default.

 

1. Navigate to your statements

Go to Faithlife.com and select your Finance Team in the sidebar.

Note: You must be a member of your Finance Team to customize your church’s giving statements.

Click Statements in the left-hand Admin panel. 

Any statements you’ve created show below, including draft, scheduled, and previously published statements.

 

2. Customize Global Statement Settings.

To customize your global statement settings, click the settings icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen. Decisions you make here will affect how and when giving statements display in each giver’s Giving Portal.

Global publish settings

Decide when to generate giving statements and/or email them to your givers.

Set your fiscal year start date. The settings show your church's fiscal year start date which you can change in Account Settings. Your fiscal year start date is reflected in your statement period options below and provides an anchor point for your church finances.

Schedule statements and/or emails. You can provide statements on an annual, semi-annual, quarterly, or quarterly YTD basis and tell Faithlife to notify givers via email who have donated in the given period. Check any given period to automatically generate giving statements for that period. Generated giving statements display in each giver’s Giving Portal.

Important: By default, Faithlife Giving assumes a fiscal year start of January 1 and publishes statements and sends an email annually two weeks after the start of the year.

Once you’ve enabled giving statements for any period above, choose between Publish or Publish and send email.

• Publish: generates statements in each giver’s Giving portal, but does not notify givers via email. You can manually send emails for a given statement by selecting it in the table below and scheduling a communication email or print the statements for manual distribution.
• Publish and send email: both generates statements and notifies givers via the email on file.

Whatever option you choose, you can set a relative timeframe to publish or publish and send the email: immediately, after a day, after a week, after two weeks, or custom. You could, for example, publish both quarterly and annual statements, but only notify your givers annually. Those who want to view quarterly statements can manually log into their Giving Portal to access quarterly statements.

Note: For the example above with a Fiscal Year Start Date of January 1st, those options would mean: immediately (January 1), after a day (January 2nd), after a week (January 8th), or after two weeks (January 15th).

Whenever a statement is published, a banner will appear when givers log into their Giving Portal at faithlife.com/giving. If you’ve chosen to send an email, they’ll also receive an email notification directing them to view the statement.

Global statement design

You can personalize both the design of your generated PDF and the accompanying notification email copy. When you’ve finished, click Save to secure your customizations.

Customize the generated PDF

You can customize the header, body, and footer of the generated giving statements and the envelope type (if you plan on printing the statements).

Statement Header Options

• Show giving summary: Add a personalized gift-by-gift summary of the giver’s gifts on each statement.
• Show giving calculation: If you make the giving summary visible, you can include a giving calculation which will be customized for each giver. 

Statement Envelope Options

If you plan to print the statements for manual distribution, select the envelope type that matches your needs. Your selection will format the statement for the correct window placement of the name and address on the statement.

Note: You can choose to only print statements for givers who do not have an email address associated with their account.

Statement Body Options

• Salutation: Add a personalized salutation using the giver’s full name. This will appear at the top of the statement.
• Statement Message: You can provide a custom statement message using the text editor. It includes common features, like styling options, alignments, links (), or images (). To resize an image, drag from one of its corners. You can also insert a file from your church’s file vault (). Depending on the file type, this may display as an embedded image, a link, or if you’re inserting a text document, the text of the document you add will be copied into the giving statement. Learn more about using your group’s file vault.

Statement Footer Options
Choose to show or hide your church’s Tax ID, Email, Website Address, Phone, and Address.

Customize the notification email

If you choose to send notification emails to your givers when you publish statements, you can provide your own email message using the text editor.

As with the statement message text editor, it includes common features, like styling options, alignments, links (), or images (). To resize an image, drag from one of its corners. You can also insert a file from your church’s file vault (). Depending on the file type, this may display as an embedded image, a link, or if you’re inserting a text document, the text of the document you add will be copied into the body of the email. Learn more about using your group’s file vault.

To simplify navigation for your givers, consider inserting a direct link to the statement. Place your cursor in the textbox below and click Insert and select Statement Link to provide a personalized link to each giver’s statement.

Note: If your church switched to Faithlife Giving in the middle of your fiscal year or if you need to send out additional year-end tax statements, inform your givers in the body of the email. For example: “This year, we used two different platforms to record your gifts. In addition to this statement from Faithlife Giving, you will receive an additional statement for all contributions prior to June.”

3. Customize Individual Statements

To customize any individual statement, click to open a statement from the table below.

Note: From this view, you can manually publish any statement or send an email notification about any statement. Check the desired statement row, click the Actions button, and choose to Publish, Send test email communication, or Publish and Send email.

Your global default statement and email message show above and all your recipients for that specific statement show in a table below.

Any changes you make to the statement message or email message will override your global statement defaults. To simplify navigation for your givers, consider inserting a direct link to the statement. Place your cursor in the textbox below and click Insert and select Statement Link to provide a personalized link to each giver’s statement. You can preview your changes by clicking Send test email, which will send your email address a test email.

To preview statements, check the givers' rows in the table (you can select an individual, multiple givers, or all) and click Actions and then View Statements.

Note: You can filter available givers from the Show dropdown menu to include all givers, those with emails, those with emails but no address, those with an address, etc. This is especially useful if you wish to print statements for specific givers, e.g., those without emails.