A member hands your treasurer a stock transfer form. Another leaves a truck full of canned goods at the food pantry drop-off. A widower donates his late wife's car. All three want a giving statement they can hand to their accountant in April, and all three put your church in an awkward spot: you have to acknowledge the gift without pricing it.
That instinct to help — to just write down what you think the stock or the car is worth — is the mistake. The wording below is built to describe the gift precisely while leaving the number to the person whose job it actually is: the giver.
Why the church does not assign the value
For gifts of cash, the amount is not in question — a check for $200 is a check for $200. For gifts of property, the value is a judgment call: what were those shares worth on the date they transferred, what is a fair estimate for a used car, what is a reasonable count for a box of groceries. As a general rule, that judgment belongs to the donor, who is the one claiming the deduction, not to the church that received the item.
Put plainly: your statement's job is to say what was given and when. It is not your job to say what it was worth. Once you accept that division, the wording gets much simpler, because you are no longer trying to guess a number you were never supposed to supply.
Template wording for a stock or securities gift
For a gift of publicly traded stock, list the security by name, the number of shares, and the date your church received them into its brokerage account — not the date the giver initiated the transfer, which can be days earlier. A line like this covers it:
- Date received: March 14, 2025
- Description: 100 shares of [Company Name] common stock
- Value: not stated — the donor determines fair market value as of the date of transfer
That last line is not filler. It tells the giver, in plain language, exactly why there is no dollar figure next to their gift, so they do not read the blank as an oversight and call to ask what happened to it.
Template wording for donated property
A car, a piece of land, a musical instrument for the worship team — the pattern is the same. Describe the item in enough detail that the giver recognizes it a year later, note the date it was received, and skip the value.
“Received March 2, 2025: one 2014 four-door sedan, donated to the church. No goods or services were provided in exchange for this gift. The church does not assign a value to donated property; the donor is responsible for determining fair market value for tax purposes.”
For anything above a certain value, the giver's own paperwork may require an independent appraisal and a signature from your church simply acknowledging receipt of the item — not endorsing a number. That distinction, acknowledging receipt versus certifying a value, is worth stating outright in your wording so nobody on either side confuses the two.
Template wording for in-kind and material gifts
Canned goods for the pantry, diapers for the benevolence closet, folding chairs for the fellowship hall — these gifts rarely have a receipt attached, and the giver is often estimating the value themselves from a grocery run. Your wording stays the same: describe, date, no value.
“Received throughout Q1 2025: non-perishable food items donated to the church pantry ministry. Quantity and value were not assessed by the church.”
If a giver wants an itemized count rather than a quarterly summary, that is a reasonable ask and worth doing at the time of drop-off, while the boxes are still in front of someone — not reconstructed from memory in January.
What goes on the year-end statement itself
The cleanest layout separates cash giving from non-cash giving into two clearly labeled sections on one document, rather than blending them into a single list where a stock gift sits next to a check with no visual distinction. A simple header change — “Cash contributions” above one list, “Non-cash contributions” above the other — does most of the work.
This is one more reason the fall cleanup pass described in the year-end giving statement checklist matters for non-cash gifts specifically: a stock transfer recorded to the wrong household, or a donated car logged under the giver's maiden name from years ago, is exactly the kind of error that a December scramble does not catch but an October reconciliation does.
Keeping the giver's trust through the wording, not just the number
Careful wording on non-cash gifts is really an extension of the same instinct behind tracking giving in a way that respects the giver — treating a record as something the giver will eventually read, not just a number for the books. A donor who gave appreciated stock chose a more complicated path than writing a check, usually for tax reasons of their own; a statement that gets the description and date right, and stays out of the valuation question, tells them the church understood the gift.
Where SundayBridge fits into this: giving records hold a note field alongside each entry, so a non-cash gift can carry its full description — the security name and share count, the item and condition — right next to the date it was received, ready to pull onto the statement instead of hunting it down from an email thread in January. The valuation judgment stays exactly where it belongs, with the donor and their accountant.
Before you send anything, ask your accountant
Everything above is workflow wording, built from the general shape of how non-cash gifts are commonly handled — it is not legal or tax advice, and the specific requirements for your statements can vary by situation and change over time. Before your first batch of non-cash statements goes out, have your accountant confirm the exact language, especially around larger property gifts, so the wording matches current requirements rather than last year's. A short pass now also pairs well with a broader database cleanup if your non-cash gifts have been sitting in a paper folder instead of attached to the giver's record.