The Insanity of Gambling With Your Gifts

 

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This is part 10 of 10 in a series called INSANITY: 10 Crazy Things Churches Do That Hinder Online Giving. When it comes to online giving, we’ve identified 10 ways your expectations don’t line up with most online giving vendors’ practices and platforms.

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You’ve heard the saying… “It takes money to make money.” While that may be true when investing in the stock market, it shouldn’t apply to church donations.

When it comes to online giving, insanity is paying as much as $10,000 PER MONTH for online giving software and expecting giving to increase.

What Monthly Contracts Say

Monthly contracts are a strategy for organizations to ensure that their own revenue stays level, not yours. They can be a sign that a vendor knows its software—on its own—won’t keep customers.

Think about it: When you compare online giving platforms, do the ones with a significant monthly fee really provide a better experience for your givers (which, by the way, is how you increase giving)?

Unfortunately, no. Our research shows that platforms with monthly fees are just as likely to break the deadly sins of online giving that cause the 83% rate of gift abandonment on charitable websites. In this way, they can actually decrease gifts.

Do the Math

Transaction fees will never exceed the amount of the gift. That’s how percentages work. If overall giving increases, or givers pay their own transaction fees, this minimal cost could even be canceled out.

But what if the unthinkable happens: A pandemic hits and many of your givers lose their jobs? Or leadership takes an unpopular stand on a divisive issue and a huge chunk of your people leave?

If the only cost for your online giving is that small percentage of fees, you may lose the gifts of those who leave, but you won’t go in the red on, or cancel out, the gifts you retain. But if your online giving monthly contract costs thousands of dollars a month, you could be looking at OWING your online giver more than you brought in. Now that’s insanity!

Is Your Online Giving Contract Keeping You Up at Night?

Some churches have tried to get out of contracts that didn’t live up to a vendor’s giving increase guarantee, only to discover that the unthinkable events listed above nullify the guarantee. They’ve discovered that the required steps they had to take to ‘qualify’ for the guarantee are actually slippery, immeasurable and unprovable.

If you’re paying a high monthly fee for your online giving, you may have nightmares about the bottomline on your contributions, if you aren’t too afraid to examine it:

• How many gifts does it take just to pay for the contract?
• What could you have done in your community last year with that amount?
• And what would givers say (some of whom already balk at transaction fees), if they learned that their gift did nothing but cover the cost of the church’s online giving?

Maybe it’s time to stop the insanity and keep more of your gifts.

Free Giving Experience Audit

Did you know that 83% of the people who visit your website LEAVE without making a donation?

Our team will review your church’s online giving experience against 60 of the most common obstacles that get in the way of a giver’s generosity.

We will then send you a detailed set of recommendations that will help you to reach your true giving potential.

Schedule your free Online Giving Experience Audit now.

 
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