AGFinancial helps ministries bridge the gap to their vision by creating a movement of generosity within your organization. Part of this process involves making sure that it is simple for people to financially partner with you. Electronic giving is one effective way to develop a broad base of financial ministry supporters. However, it’s not as simple as just having e-giving or online giving as an option. You need a strategy, a solution, and effective process that support your electronic giving. Here are the first three of ten suggestions to help boost your organization’s electronic giving.
Have a Simple Solution
- Make sure you have a simple, effective, secure, and easy-to-use system in place. A good system should allow people to easily track and change their giving. If they want to increase their monthly donations or start to give money to missions it should be simple.
- Make sure your system supports and focuses on reoccurring giving.
- If you have a service in place, ask your people what they like and dislike about it. Use that feedback to improve it.
- If you do not offer online and onsite electronic options, then do some research on best practices in that field or let us recommend some options to you to get this established.
Talk About It
- During your offering window, be sure to include discussion on electronic giving. Let people know it is an option.
- When you have a special need come up, let people know they can give electronically. Sometimes people assume that if they don’t have cash then they can’t be involved.
- Share how you personally use electronic giving and/or talk about how people are using it. For example, "I schedule my tithes to automatically come out of my bank account, but I still give offerings during the worship service. How are you using electronic giving?"
Thank People Who Use It
- When you thank people for giving in the offering, acknowledge those who have given online or have scheduled their support.
- When people sign up to give online or schedule reoccurring donations, be sure to send out a purposeful thank you email. Share how they are supporting the vision.
- When you have something like a snowstorm that forces you to cancel services, take the time to send out an email to the congregation thanking those who have still supported the ministry by giving online or scheduling their giving. Explain how reoccurring gifts enable ministry to still go on even though services are cancelled. (Outreach, warming center, food supplies, benevolence, disaster response, etc.) If you don’t send out an email, then just mention it in the next service. Show pictures of the ministry that occurred.