Thinking of Building a Church App? Read This First.

You have probably heard that smartphone owners spend 85% of their mobile time in apps. You may even be considering building a church app for your place of worship. If everyone is spending time in apps, you want to be where the people are, right?

Not so fast. Building an app is not the best way to capitalize on your parishioners’ smartphone fever. Here’s why.

Building a Church App Is Harder Than It Sounds

How many people do you have on staff at your church? How much extra money do you have available to spend? It may seem like a fast and easy task, but building a church app is difficult and time-consuming. You probably don’t have the time or money to spare.

Since it is doubtful that you already have someone on staff that can do app development, the first step will be to hire someone to do it for you. This can get quite expensive, and you may have to wait quite a while for the finished product. Even after the app is ready to use, technology needs upkeep. For that reason, you will need to have someone available that can provide support to your team and your members. Again, that can be a costly addition to your budget.

What if you do have the money to spend? What if you you went ahead with building your own church app? After all of that hard work, chances are good that the app will not return on that investment.

Most Apps Are Rarely Used

Yes, people do spend most of their time in apps when using smartphones, but that doesn’t mean they use every app regularly. In fact, 80-90% of apps are only used once.

According to an October 2015 study by Research Now:

Only 29.1% of Android apps are kept on the device for longer than one day.

After 30 days, that percentage drops to 3.3%.

The numbers are similar for iOS apps: 25.5% are kept for longer than one day, while 3.2% last 30 days.

Even if you build a great app, it won’t be worth the investment if you can’t get people to use it. Why put in so much time and energy to build an app that may not even get used?

Let Someone Else Do The Work

Thankfully, you don’t have to. There is a better solution. You can still get all the benefits of accepting donations through a church app without actually building one yourself.

That’s where Givelify comes in. By using an app that has already been built and tested, you can save your team a lot of work and unnecessary headaches.

Not only has Givelify already gone through the development phase, but it has already bucked the app usage trends. Remember how we discussed that most apps are only used once? On the average, Givelify users donate through the app twice a month and give an average of $100 during each use.

One App, Multiple Churches

Imagine for a moment that you often visit multiple churches. If you downloaded an app for every place of worship you visit, how often would you use each of those apps? You probably would use each app only when visiting the respective church. By contrast, if you had one app to use for all of those churches, you would end up using it multiple times.

That’s why Givelify users keep coming back. Our church app allows parishioners to give to multiple churches and charities through the same app. Instead of downloading a new app for every place of worship or nonprofit they want to support, they can just use one to do it all.

Givelify means less work for you and an easier experience for your churchgoers. Isn’t that a much better solution?