Online Giving. Helping You Sort Your Way Through the Options

When deciding which tool to use for your online giving option, the process of choice can be overwhelming. Do you go with a standard well known business option or do you go with a church specific option? Does the size of the donation matter? Is there a charge for the transaction? Why are there so many options? The questions seem to go on and on. In this article we break down Secure Give, Lifeway E-Give, PayPal, WePay, Stripe, and Kindrid and hope to take away some of those overwhelming thoughts and help you guide your way to the best option for you!

Lets start with what many options have in common

All of these options are highly secure, are mobile responsive, and have multiple giving options (credit, debit, etc). Secure Give, Lifeway E-Give, WePay, Kindrid, and Stripe allow the donor to set up recurring giving options. Options like Secure Give, Kindrid and Lifeway E-Giving allows you to use custom graphics and color combinations to match your church’s brand, have multiple campaign options (building fund, general giving, etc), the ability to upload reports to most church software, capabilities to sign up for church events, etc. Secure Give, PayPal, Kindrid and WePay boast about how great their support team is if you ever have any questions. Also, Secure Give, PayPal, and WePay have direct linking capabilities with the donor’s bank account.

Secure Give
Now let’s breakdown their individual features that may be unique to each of them. We’ll start with Secure Give. Secure Give allows the user to integrate with their social media accounts. They can share their activity (joining a group, volunteering, fundraising) with their followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc. This drives interest as well as donations. It also has a payment module that allows the user to make payments for things like camps. There is an email connection that allows a potential donor to request more information by submitting their name and email address. It collects the donor’s information so that you can stay up to date with the donor’s contact information and giving history. On the backend, it has unlimited users and you can assign different security levels to each user. There is Multi-Site capabilities for churches with more than one campus location. It can save payment information making it easier for the donor to give again. It will email the donor a receipt. Donors can give anonymously if they desire. Donors have access to their giving history (this is especially useful for tax reasons). And it can include a simple “Thank You” message or you can create a custom one.

Lifeway E-Giving
One of the best aspects of LifeWay E-Giving other than what we mentioned above is that it can send text message reminders. This is a great tool to boost your donation total! A user can set up a time and date to receive a text message reminding them to make a donation. This is useful for weekly giving as well as specific giving like for when funds are due for camp, mission trips, etc.

PayPal
PayPal is one of the most recognizable online giving options in the world. It comes with instant credibility and the user will feel secure. As mentioned earlier, it will link with a user’s bank account and its highly secure. The negative aspect with PayPal is there is a merchant fee.

WePay
The thing that is pretty special with WePay is the documentation aspect of the software. WePay offer to mail donor’s a tax document at the end of the year. This saves time and stress from an often already overworked office staff.

Stripe
Stripe has the capabilities to save a donor’s payment info; making it easier for the donor to give again. Like Secure Give, Stripe has on the backend multiple users capabilities and different security options for those users. You can set up a notification every time  a donation is made so you never are stuck wondering if they gave. You can download reports that work with Quickbooks which makes accounting easier. It will email the donor a “Thank You” note for their donations. It also has options for multiple currency types for donors who are giving from overseas.

Kindred
And finally, there is Kindrid. Kindrid has some very unique features. Using Kindrid the donor simply texts a dollar amount to a phone number assigned to the church. So for example: a user simply texts $10 to 90999. Kindrid also has web integrations for your website as well.

At ChurchPress we recommend Secure Give.

SecureGive has the best options, really nice customization capabilities, and they provide the most helpful support out of everyone we reviewed. As LeVar Burton always said, “But you don’t have to take my word for it.” At least now you can be informed on our recommendations along with the various features of each service from our perspective. Whatever your decision be sure to make the best one for your church needs!