Are you interested in upgrading your church offering plate?
Chances are, your church is already offering some kind of electronic giving. At the very least, your church provides electronic deposit or automatic withdrawals.
However, if your church isn’t offering some way to give on the church website or use mobile payments, your church is missing out on several ways to maximize online giving for church members and simply make it easier for them to give to their favorite local church.
Basic Features
Here are the basic features you should look for and keep in mind when looking for an online giving solution:
- Mobile Giving
This makes it easy to give straight from the pew or thousands of miles away. - Text-to-Give
This is easily one of the most overlooked and under utilized features of a giving solution. Text-to-Give is excellent for special fundraising and works super well when used in printed materials or online. - Online Giving
I certainly hope you already have online giving. If you don’t, you need to. And if your current solution doesn’t give you the option to embed the form in your website (allowing church goers to stay on your website when giving), then you need to find one that does. - Kiosk Giving
There are many reasons you may want to utilize this. Whether you want to help navigate church members through the process or value the public action of giving to your church, kiosk giving is a very nice feature. - Admin Entry
This is an easily overlooked feature that you realize really fast. Sometimes you are handed a check or even emailed a credit card number (church secretaries have seen it all, people), you need an easy way to manually submit donations.
You might not benefit from all these features all the time, but I highly recommend your online giving platform offer these. If your current provider does not, it’s time to shop around.
The Online Giving Power Ups
If you want to really level up your online giving, use an online giving solution that ties all of the aforementioned features together into one package. I have seen far too many churches and organizations add a new service or sign-up for different services that can be accomplished by one vendor.
There are several reasons why. Maybe it’s too hard (it’s not that hard, don’t be lazy), there can be contracts (why did you sign a contract for so long? tsk-tsk), but usually, it’s because people don’t like to change. And if it costs more money, you need to consider the time lost from juggling and managing different platforms, that savings of that cost easily justify paying more. More than likely, however, you’ll end up saving more money by using the one service anyway.
If your current provider doesn’t offer all of these features in one, you need to find one that does.
In fact, services like Tithe.ly include additional power ups like:
- Multi-gift / Designations
- ChMS Integration
- Weekly Giving Reminders
- Gift Tracking
- Fund Designations
- Auto Recurring Giving
- Transaction Details and Reporting
- Multi-Campus Support
- And more!
As you can see, a mobile and online giving platform not only makes it easier for people to give (and the is the future of monetary transactions), it also brings a feature set that is very helpful in aiding the local church.
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