Yes!  Another great reason to consider Churchteams online giving.  Yesterday we released a new option to allow your givers the choice to cover the transaction fees for their online contribution. To be honest when I first heard of the idea of "No fees online giving," I was skeptical.

First of all, there is no such thing as "no fees" online transactions.  Banks and credit card issuing companies all charge for their services.  So, while "no fees" is technically true from the church administrative perspective, it feels misleading in that the fees are just passed on to the giver.  It seemed to me that "no fees" was marketing hype to get people's attention.

Because it was the week before Christmas and because of the craziness of Covid, you might have missed the biggest release of 2020.  I introduced it as our Digital Assistant - Scheduled Reports.  That was just over two months ago.  There wasn't a lot of fanfare, we just offered it quietly as a gift. 

As you closed out your books for the year, did you notice your online giving line item?  Did it give you sticker shock?  

Maybe your administrative oversight team even commented on it as they reviewed last year's financials.

We recently ran a report across a broad cross section of our churches with contributions in 2020. In it we discovered that Churchteams clients brought in 102%of the income in 2020 that they had in 2019.  

Many ministry events and mission trips have been cancelled this summer due to Covid 19 and social distancing.  But as churches begin to re-open for worship, they are doing so with a renewed passion for their calling to make disciples of all nations.  

We recently released an upgrade to our contributions system that includes the ability to archive the image of a check that is scanned into Churchteams.  We now offer this service to our clients for an additional $15 / month for up to 7 years of check storage.  The video below shows you how this service works.  But, let's start with some context.

For Church Geeks like us, January means it's time to send out giving statements.  You could send out the familiar "thank you and here's what happened last year" cover letter that you  print, stuff in an envelope, seal, stamp and mail.  But, it's 2020 and there are some creative things you can do to spice it up this year.  Here are some thoughts on how to salt your giving statement content and  pepper your process.

Most non-staff attenders and leaders use Churchteams by completing a form, responding to a push notification (email or text) or by using Text-to-Church^TM.  However, we've had a lot of requests for non-staff level access through a more traditional (email address with a password) login.  We released an upgrade yesterday to address this need.

We released text to give in early 2017. To get an idea about what difference text to give is making in churches 2 years later, I researched giving over the past six months in five churches that have been intentional in using online and text giving as part of their stewardship development strategy. 

I'm in the process of writing another blog post on giving by text with some new statistics I'm eager to share about how texting and online giving work together.  But we've needed a blog post for quite awhile to follow-up this blog post in April, 2018 about Check Data Entry.

Proverbs 4:23 tells us, "Guard your heart because all you do flows from it."  That means that the choices people make, the things that drive and motivate them to action are an outflow of their heart.

So, when they give to your church or organization for the first time, they are saying something significant.  They are saying they believe in what you are doing and they want to be a part.  

Matthew 5:37 starts, "Let what you say be simply 'yes' or 'no'."