annual giving statements

The Annual Giving Statements feature enables churches to prepare and distribute end-of-year tax statements to their donors. These statements include tax-deductible transactions recorded in Pushpay and are formatted to meet IRS requirements for charitable contribution receipts.

Client: Pushpay

Roles: Interaction & UI design / animation / prototyping / user testing 

 

 
 

the challenge

At the end of each year, churches in the United States prepare annual giving statements for their donors so they can claim back tax on their donations. This typically entails an arduous process involving multiple software to consolidate contributions for every single donor. The second part of the task is composing a letterhead detailing how the church is doing that year and what funds these donations were used for. User research showed that it was a time consuming and frustrating process for many financial administrators in the church.

 
 
 
 

validating customer's pain points

We took the initial research materials and validated key customer's pain points by testing lo-fi prototypes and hifi mock-ups with a number of customers.

 
 

the solution

To solve this challenge firstly we needed to build a web-based application that could compile and generate annual giving statements for church administrators easily. Secondly we wanted to simplify the process of collating and preparing such statements so our product could offer better value by saving time.

The solution takes form in an easy 5-step feature called 'Annual Giving Statements' (AGS), which an organization-level administrator can use through the Pushpay platform.

 
 
 
 

One of the challenges with providing an accurate giving statement is that at times the same giver could be tithing or making a donation using different payment platforms and user profiles. So we built a feature where an administrator could easily consolidate multiple payer profiles that belonged to the same donor. Once this first step is completed the administrator can continue with the remaining four steps.

The steps are:

  1. Consolidate duplicate community members

  2. Compose an email message (to replace the traditional cover letter)

  3. Preview the giving statements

  4. Generate the statements

  5. Distribute them via emails or by printing them out.

 

Test & Iterate

 

Through further user testing sessions I gradually increased the fidelity of the UI design and improved the overall experience in an iterative cycle. As part of my role in this project I planned, recruited, wrote the UT script, facilitated the user testing sessions and synthesize the findings. All of these tasks were done in collaboration with the Product Analyst and the Lead User Researcher. Nothing was done in isolation.

 
 
 

Findings from the two rounds of user testings were analysed and synthesized into a report document that was then shared with the project team. They served as a way to simplify and improve the overall UI design.

 
 

Reward your user

 
 

Adding a little sense of fun can delight your user and increase your product's desirability. Here, I've created a short paper plane that flies through your screen to reward a successful statements distribution via email.

 

the annual giving statements

 

When designing the actual giving statement, I worked closely with the lead front-end engineer to make sure the statements could be easily branded to the church’s own brand identity. The statements are generated digitally as PDF files (for email distribution) and printable to the standard US letter size and envelope. 

 
 

mobile design

Our user research showed that financial administrators from Enterprise churches needed the flexibility to write custom messages or publish the giving statements on the go. So we made sure the design was mobile-friendly and built responsively.  

 
 

Measuring Success

To measure success, we looked at direct customer feedbacks from the Beta testers, as well as monitoring how many customers use this feature and how long they spend on it.

"This feature saves me time... I used to spend a couple of days to complete all the tax statements, and for this year's statements, I finished them in 4 hours." – MM Church customer

The benefit to the church includes freeing time from volunteers so they can perform their other tasks. 

As a business, we've also seen an increase of gifts being processed and recorded via Pushpay, in particular gifts that were made by other methods (e.g. cheque, cash and bank transfer). The AGS feature encourages more customers to use the Pushpay platform because church members would get a complete view of their gifts each year, as all their transactions are now available via Pushpay.