Coffee Hour Is Your Friend

Does your church host a coffee hour before service, or some other time for your members to eat, drink, and socialize? Do you accept donations to help cover the cost? By using mobile apps for churches, you can enable your members to give any amount, even if they do not have any cash.

The Cost of Coffee Hour

Offering time for your members to socialize outside of service is beneficial in fostering a sense of community. Having a time set aside for people to come and drink coffee together is not very expensive, but it isn’t free, either. Since you have to purchase all of the items you will provide for attendees, you ask that your members give $2 when they attend these special gatherings.

They are more than willing to pitch in, but what happens if they don’t happen to have $2 in cash? What if they only have a $20 bill, and they need it to buy gas on their way home after church? Because you would never want to hold someone back from taking part in the social event, even if they can’t afford to chip in, you allow them to participate anyway — which means you come up short.

Mobile Apps for Churches Can Help

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With mobile apps for churches, you would not have to do without those donations and pay for supplies out of your own pocket. Your members at coffee hour would not be held back from giving due to a lack of cash in their wallet. Instead, they could simply pull out their smartphone and make a $2 donation to the church’s coffee hour fund on the spot.

Rev. Bennett Jones from Christ Church Fitchburg has seen the benefits of mobile apps for churches with his organization’s coffee hour:

If you’ve got 10 people at coffee hour who would probably give $2 but aren’t giving at all, because they don’t have any money in their wallet. If they all gave $2 and we ended up with, let’s say, $15 [after minimal fees], it’s still $15 we didn’t have, and we are getting money that we wouldn’t have gotten at all. That just strikes me as a natural win-win for everybody.

To make it even better, you won’t have to wait very long for that money to arrive. Instead of telling your members to wait and pay their $2 the following week, they can pay it immediately and the money will be deposted into the church bank account by the next business day. They won’t accidentally forget to bring the extra cash next week, and you won’t have to wait to be reimbursed for the cost of the coffee materials. Everyone wins.