8 tips for choosing the best giving solution for your church
By Amy McCollum
Head of Operations
OnlineGiving.org
Digital giving is a vital component for the health of all churches. While giving is an essential act of worship, it is also an active investment in the ministry God performs through the Church.
There are numerous choices available for churches when it comes to giving solutions, and finding the right fit can be a challenge. Each church or ministry needs to consider the giving interface for the donors, the security components, the administrative and reconciliation tools, and how the giving platform connects to your other existing systems.
To these ends, here are 8 tips to help your church make the right choice.
#1: Choose a reputable provider to give donors a safe, smooth and frictionless experience. Because donors today use many different technology points to access your digital giving, the process must be simple on each device they use. The first gift should be simple, and the next should be even more accessible. The best giving systems will offer various ways to authenticate or log in, such as biometric login, 2-factor authentication via codes sent to the donor’s phone or email, and the traditional password method.
#2: Donors should feel empowered to manage the information they give at any time and be able to access their information to make changes. Your online giving interface must allow them to manage their payment methods, update their recurring giving, and manage their personal information. The best giving systems should also integrate deeply with your church management system (ChMS) or database to allow donors to easily access their full giving history and statements. This empowerment ensures donors feel in control and valued in their giving journey.
#3: Equal in importance to the donor experience is the importance of your giving system’s administrative processes. The administrative side of your giving system has many factors that should be considered, from your accounting processes to the accurate recording of donor data. Your accounting team should easily see the donation deposit batches for any date and be able to match up the amount given with the deposit amount in your bank. Further, the ability to monitor giving trends and engage donors with helpful information about the ministry or impact of the church should be simple.
#4: An excellent online giving system should have deep ChMS integrations and great donor engagement features. These tools can significantly enhance a church’s operations. A simple ChMS integration might involve migrating donation data, but a deep ChMS integration goes further, including multiple areas of database integration. Deep ChMS integrations streamline administrative processes, while donor engagement tools help build stronger connections with the congregation. It’s essential to look for intelligent tools that allow tailored communications to suit the church’s current needs, such as creating different donation pages for specific campaigns and sending targeted communications to donors using the system’s deep integration with the church’s ChMS or database.
#5: Most leading ChMSs can integrate with an external giving provider, even if they don’t publish it on their website. If the ChMS has an API, your giving system should be able to send various types of data directly to it. If your church’s ChMS doesn’t work with APIs, make sure you can export donations from your giving system to your ChMS to save time and reduce mistakes.
#6: The online giving site should always be at maximum availability, even if the church servers are down. The giving system should be able to monitor activity and ensure that upstream issues do not affect your recurring donations. For instance, if a donor is set to give recurring via a Discover card, but the Discover card network is down, the giving system should be able to monitor that situation, detect when the issue is resolved, and run that donor’s gift on the same day.
#7: Ensuring the continued security of your system is also essential. A robust giving platform should include real-time monitoring and continually improve system security to protect your church. The most secure way to handle donations is through a state-of-the-art standalone system, separate from your ChMS. By focusing on integrations and intelligent components that work well together, you can maintain maximum flexibility in each part of your system, thus creating an optimal operational infrastructure for your church’s tools.
#8: To make the best choice for your church, it’s important to involve key staff members or leaders in the selection process. Selecting the right giving provider for your church is a significant decision and requires expertise and perspective from various functions, such as finance, database administration, communications, stewardship, engagement, and executive teams. Each church might have a unique combination of gifts, skills and perspectives, so it’s important to tailor the evaluation team accordingly. The evaluation team should work collaboratively, leveraging their unique insights to ensure that the chosen giving solution aligns with the church’s mission and needs. Ultimately, the most important goal is to do what is best for your church when making a decision for your giving solution.
Amy McCollum is Head of Operations at OnlineGiving.org. [www.onlinegiving.org] She has more than 20 years of experience in church finance and operations. McCollum joined OnlineGiving.org in late 2017 and has worked with hundreds of churches, improving their operations infrastructure and processes. She is passionate about process-related work and is a self-professed “Jesus nerd.”
