The Secret to Success: How to Make Mobile Church Giving Work for You

When you first sign up with Givelify, we do everything we can to set you up for success. We will spend time on the phone coaching you through the process of launching your new church giving solution, supply you with graphics and videos to play during service time, and even provide printable cards that give step-by-step instructions to your members on how to give.

Done properly, a giving app launch can propel your church giving through the roof (we frequently have organizations report increases in giving of 25-40%) and get people plugged in and actively involved in propelling the vision of the church forward.

“What if our church giving hasn’t increased yet?”

Maybe you’re reading this and think, “I wish we had seen that kind of increase,” or “Our online giving usage has kind of plateaued,” and you’re wondering what you can do. People are sometimes tempted to supplement with gimmicks (looking at you, text-to-give) or change their church giving app altogether when, in reality, there’s one easy step you can follow to improve the adoption rate and usage in your organization.

It’s pretty complex, so grab something to take notes with. I’ll wait.

Okay, ready? Here it is. (Drumroll, please…)

Talk about it.

That’s it.

That’s the number one thing you can do to improve how people engage with your giving solution. Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it.

See, one of the biggest mistakes we make in the church is under-communication. This isn’t just a problem with giving, of course. Many events in many churches might have been even more successful had we started talking about the details earlier and repeated them more frequently.

Church giving may not be the most important topic, but it’s still important.

I can only speak from my experience as a pastor in the Pentecostal tradition, but I know that, for me, I feel pressure to keep things moving along and get to the “important things,” like the Word. Often that means rushing through announcements or skipping some altogether. While I agree that nothing is more important than the Word, I’ve had to train myself to realize that just because something isn’t more important, that doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.

When it comes time for offering, for example, we don’t like to repeat things too often. We don’t want to bore people or be too mundane and predictable. The problem with that approach, however, is that it fails to inform those who need to hear the information most —our guests and visitors. If you have multiple ways to give (during the offering physically, online, and via mobile), you should be talking about those options during each and every service.

“But we don’t have any visitors today.”

I hear you. Do it anyway. Why? Because you’re training your congregation that this is how you do things, and because you never know when the light bulb is going to go off in someone’s mind and they’re going to reach for their mobile device to give their first online offering.

That’s a powerful moment that happens quickly for some people — the day you made that initial announcement — but for others, it can take some time. Don’t miss out on empowering the late-adopters to give simply because you failed to talk about it! My pastor taught me “you get what you preach.” So make habitual communication of your giving options a regular part of your services and events, and watch the light bulbs start to come on!

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