Are You Missing Out on Tithes from Your Most Generous Members?

If your church is not offering online giving options, you may be missing out on regular tithes from your most generous members.

Offering e-Giving to members who want to donate but don’t have cash or a checkbook with them increases your opportunity to receive more donations. Electronic contributions also tend to be larger – by more than 35 percent on average. 

  Need more evidence that enabling members to give electronically is a good investment? Among churches and other nonprofits that rely on donations to fund their missions, fulfillment rates for pledges made electronically average 98 percent, which is 58 percent higher than those collected by other methods.

Do you have less than $20 in your wallet?

Advancements in technology that have reshaped the way we live have also changed the way we give. Data analysis of more than 50 nonprofit groups in another study showed that online giving and regular monthly giving among participants increased 14 percent, with similar growth continuing the next year. Pair that fact with a recent study, which found that 40 percent of consumers usually have less than $20 in their wallet or purse, and it’s easy to see that churches should consider e-Giving a valuable and growing resource.

For your church, e-Giving is more secure and takes the burden of processing cash and checks off your staff. By encrypting data and storing it on secure servers, it also reduces the risks associated with storing your members’ personal information.

Your older members will embrace e-Giving

One concern for many churches is that their older populations – who contribute a substantial portion of their revenue -- might be too conservative to embrace e-Giving. But surveys show that seniors’ overall use of technology continues to increase, so your older members may be more tech-savvy than you realize. Even AARP, the nonprofit serving people 50 and older, offers an online donation option for its foundation.

If you don’t think your congregation is ready to embrace e-Giving, or if you need to convince your leadership to get on board, our recent paper addresses the questions we’re most often asked about e-Giving:

• Is it complicated? Will we need an IT person to launch and manage it?
• How can we ensure it’s safe for our church and our members?
• Will it be hard to track and record/credit payments per individual donor?
• Will it work with other software we use to run our organization?
• Will it take away from the “personal” aspect of giving?
• How can we let our members know that it’s available?

Download to learn more about how e-Giving can help you increase donations with simple and secure options for members to contribute.

Sources: The 2013 Federal Reserve Payments Study; Bankrate.com; Hidden Gold: How Monthly Giving Will Build Donor Loyalty, Boost Your Organization's Income, and Increase Financial Stability; The Big Boom in Online Giving; Nielsen.com.