When a campaign finishes
What happens when a giving drive ends — the closing summary Psalmly emails you, the pre-written thank-you you can send to your church in a couple of clicks, and how to get a per-person list if you'd rather write notes by hand.
A drive has a beginning and a middle — the ask, then the thermometer climbing. The end matters just as much, and it's the part that's easiest to let slip past. Psalmly gives you two things when a drive closes: the number, and an easy way to tell your church.
The closing summary
The morning after a drive ends, every admin gets a notification — in the bell, and by email — with how it finished:
"A new roof before winter" reached its goal $15,240 raised from 38 givers.
It isn't a reminder that the drive ended; you know that. It's the closing number, put in your hands while there's still a Sunday to stand up and say it out loud.
The email opens the drive, where the same summary sits at the top of the page along with the full gift list.
Sending a thank-you
On a finished drive you'll see Write a thank-you. It opens a new announcement with the message already drafted for you — the headline, the amount raised, and warm wording that fits whether you met the goal or came in under it:
Thank you, church family.
Together we raised $15,240 for A new roof before winter — our goal was $15,000.
Every gift is part of that number, whether it was given online, by check, or in the offering plate. Thank you for your generosity.
Nothing is sent until you send it. The draft opens in the normal announcement composer, so you can rewrite every word, add what the money will do next, change who receives it, or save it as a draft and come back. Psalmly will never send a message to your congregation that you haven't read.
Why it goes to the whole church
The thank-you is written to your whole congregation, not a filtered list of donors — and that's deliberate.
A drive's total counts everything given to its fund while the drive ran, including cash and checks. If Psalmly quietly narrowed the thank-you to people who happened to click a campaign button online, it would leave out the members who put a check in the plate — often the very people a small church can least afford to overlook. Thanking everyone is both warmer and more accurate.
It also means nobody's giving is revealed. A church-wide thank-you says what we did together; it never announces who gave or how much.
If you'd rather write personal notes
For handwritten cards or a personal call, use Export thank-you list on the campaign page. It downloads a spreadsheet of the gifts that counted toward the drive — the same set behind the thermometer — so your list always matches the number you're thanking people for.
Two things to keep in mind as you work through it:
- Gifts given anonymously stay anonymous to you here.
- The list includes anyone who gave to that fund during the drive, which may include members who give regularly and weren't thinking of it as the drive. That's not a mistake — their gift is genuinely part of the total.
If the drive came up short
The closing summary and the drafted thank-you both handle this gracefully: they lead with what was raised and simply leave the goal out. There's no shortfall figure and no apology, because a church that gave what it could hasn't failed at anything.