How do you feel about Online Giving?
July 6, 2010 - 17:07
I will just post a few arguments FOR a church having the online giving option. How do you feel about this? Would you support online giving at FOC? Would you use it?
- Simple - Accepting, tracking and reporting of church online giving
- Flexible
- The ability to accept credit/check card and/or E-Check
- The ability to send custom confirmation e-mails
- The ability to accept registrations and payments for them online - Consistency - Too often members forget to catch-up on their tithes and offering if they have missed the church service due to an illness, vacation, etc. Churches using online giving have found that their giving valleys, especially in the summertime, have been leveled out through the consistency provided with automated, regularly occurring, online giving.
- Control - Minimizes the need for a church attendee to call the church office to research a specific donation. By providing self-service features that displays a person's giving history, donors can view both scheduled online giving and any other donations that were done through the traditional offering process.
- Complements - Online donations do not replace traditional methods of giving, such as passing an offering plate, rather it complements those methods by providing additional avenues for members to give. It often results in an increase in the total amount given by the members of the church.
- Reports & Statistics
- Detailed Giving and Registration Data displayed online. You are able to select a date range and also export the information to Excel
- Trends, high months, low months, month to month comparisons, week to week comparisons - all online giving data displayed in a simple to read graph.
I am for online giving. I do many other transactions online already - shopping, banking, giving to charities, etc. - and am therefore very comfortable with the idea. I am currently using an online service through my bank to pay my tithe. My bank mails my title check directly to FOC each month. I feel by doing this, I am making my tithe a priority. It is the first check that goes out each month from my account and other circumstances, like going on vacation, will not cause me to forget or be delayed in my giving. Sometimes I do miss that physical act of going up to the altar to put a check in the plate, but what I do in those cases is go up anyway and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving for God's provision/blessings at the altar instead.
In general, I think having a place we can go at any time to give just sounds like a smart idea to me.
Thank you for taking the time to list some of the pros associated with online giving. Are there any disadvantages that you can think of, i.e. security issues or fees charged to the church by credit card companies?
Questions: Can giving be setup to happen monthly (reoccurring payments) if you wanted to use the system to pay your tithe or is the setup based on just a one time payment basis? Who maintains the site? Would it make the treasurer's job easier or harder? Could people make donations to specific areas like to individuals going on a mission trip?
If I think of any more questions, I will let you know. I have to go make my family dinner right now :-)
Carol