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Selecting a great church gift software is a significant decision. If you get it right, you’ll have a setup that takes care of all your fundraising and donation initiatives, generates reports, and aids the church in making decisions.
No matter how basic or advanced your needs, church gift software is worth exploring.
Here’s why a church needs to look into good church gift software: It makes donating virtually easy and convenient and allows for quicker decision-making on donations.
Online giving is a great way to collect donations; church gift software is essential for making it possible. What features must you consider before selecting one?
What are some features you must look for in a church gift software?
Helping your administrative staff make quicker and more efficient decisions requires software that addresses the challenges uniquely faced by your church. We’ve compiled a list of features that might resonate with your requirements. Here’s what you should look for in good software:
- It is focused on your church.
A good church-giving software must be easily customized according to the church’s needs. In addition, a swift and responsive customer support team is essential to achieving the best results.
- Less manual, more automated process:
The church is paying for great software to help ease its process. Spending more manual hours making the system work better would be counterintuitive. Good software must make your work easier, not more complicated and time-consuming.
- Allows check scanning:
Checks are a popular way to donate money to the church. Allowing check scanning and envelope numbers is a great way to ensure more people can easily donate money. Find church-giving software that provides this feature.
- Keep track of donations:
You may receive a lot of donations, but with it come many questions:
- Who donated the money?
- How much money was donated?
- How much money does the fund contain at a certain point in time?
- Which is the best time/season for church giving?
These and many more metrics can be handled with a good church offering software that tracks donations.
- Dashboards for the admin, staff as well as givers:
Different dashboards allow clarity and enhance collaboration between team members. The admin controls the information available to the staff and volunteers and can assign work to everyone.
Bonus points for a giver dashboard with features showing lifetime donations, attendance, and other statistics.
- Should enable personalized communications and acknowledgments:
72% of consumers engage with marketing messages customized to their specific interests. Including their name and the name of the group or church they belong to will make your messaging more meaningful to your audience.
Whether it’s email communications, text messaging, or phone calls, software that enables personalization is a significant investment. Remember that any software you select must provide various communication tools or easily integrate with a communications tool such as CallHub.
- Should enable mobile giving and text to give:
Mobile giving and text-to-give options are increasingly in demand. With everyone owning a smartphone, donations via text message are easy to acquire with the proper messaging. In fact, in 2018, faith-based organizations saw the greatest increase in giving, with an 18.1% increase in mobile giving. See if your church-giving software supports this feature.
- Generate reports to suggest areas for improvement.
The most important feature of church offering software is its ability to generate reports that are easily read and understood. Reports help you analyze what works for the church and which initiatives are no longer worth pursuing.
Reports will also help you identify the church members who are the most active and willing to donate and volunteer.
A good church gift software can provide many more metrics, such as family connection, attendance, etc., which are different for each software. Determine your church’s needs and look for features that align with them.
For example, if you need to increase fundraising, find out if the software you are looking at offers an in-built fundraising dashboard.
Top 7 church gift software
From comprehensive church management software to specific need-based software, we’ve compiled a list of the top church-giving software you need to know about.
Breeze
Breeze is a cloud-based church management software that is focused on four primary sections:
- People: This section helps a church manage people connected to it. They have great features that will help you manage all your contacts:
- Individual profile views: The administrator can click on any contact and reveal all information related to them, including their family, the groups they belong to, the donations they have made, and the events they have attended.
- Filters: Easy filters to help you learn more about your church’s demographics and target your outreach initiatives.
- The number of contacts: Add as many people as you like with no changes in price.
- Tags: This section allows you to organize the groups within your church and keep lists up to date by categorizing each contact according to the different variables/tags you choose. With tags, you can:
- Group volunteers and members into different lists.
- Schedule messages and see who has read them.
- Events: Events help you manage everything related to calendar management, volunteer schedules, and event check-in.
- With check-in, you can track who attended which event and when.
- You can pull out the child and corresponding parent tags to ensure that the right person picks up the right child.
- Set up email alerts if people stop coming.
- Contributions: The most crucial section when speaking about a church gift software. Contributions help a church easily record gifts and who they came from. You can generate donation reports, create customized giving statements, and offer online giving and text-to-give. With this feature, you will be able to:
- Know who gave what, when, how much, and where.
- Develop monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports.
- Use the envelope number or check the scanner.
- Link the fund to which the donation is going.
Pricing: You can find out about their pricing model here.
ParishSoft
ParishSoft is specifically designed for the catholic church.
With the church gift software of ParishSoft, you can:
- Track the contributions of your family and other members and manage pledge campaigns.
- Get the information you need to send thank you letters, reports, and statements.
- Itemize all income to proper funds and connect it with correct donors. This is doubly ensured through their audit trail document.
- Get in-built tools like quick reports, dashboard search, and expert reporting.
- View data on your current page and do not have to navigate elsewhere.
- Easily access offering and pledge data from the office or home if you have an internet-connected device.
Features:
- Donor information is saved in the ParishSoft family suite, so you do not have to enter it multiple times.
- You can access census, record management, and communication tools anywhere and on any device.
- It enables predictable income, easy setup, and more ways to connect your parish than ever before.
- Members have the option to either give one-time or set up recurring giving.
- Online forms track registration for classes and events for registration and payment tracking.
- Set up alerts and create efficient reports.
Pricing: You can learn about ParishSoft’s pricing plan by requesting a demo on their website.
Faithful Steward
Faithful Steward is a desktop-based software solution that works on your local computer. They also have web-based church gifting software called Faithful Steward Web.
They provide unique church management software features and help manage church administrative tasks.
Features:
- The flexible group feature helps you manage the church’s small groups
- The church bookkeeping software posts your donations into Quickbooks or Peachtree.
- Faithful Steward Desktop allows users of the Windows version to share information with users of the Mac version and vice versa. This helps when a church shifts from one type of system to another.
Pricing: Faithful Steward charges can be found here.
Tithe.ly – church gift software
Tithe.ly has tools for churches and ministries to increase giving and engagement. It enables the church to give securely from anywhere and at any time.
Tithe.ly has unique features built considering a church’s unique needs, especially as a church gift software. Some of its best features are:
- Accommodating six ways to give (mobile, text, online, kiosk, check-scanning, and offline) into one easy-to-use platform.
- Funds can be deposited daily, weekly, or monthly into the bank account.
- Creates in-depth reports to track donations, funding, transactions, and deposits.
- With Tithe.ly’s cash and check gift entry tools, you can record your online and offline transactions into a consolidated system.
- Donors can set up auto-recurring donations with just one click to improve giving consistency.
- Its Cover the Fees™ initiative allows donors to cover the processing fee of the donation, so the church receives 100% of the donated amount.
- Donors have the option to text to give. They can text an amount to the church’s custom number, and the contribution will be made.
- Its QuickGive™ feature allows donors to donate in just a few seconds with one tap.
Pricing: Tithe.ly costs can be found here.
DonorHub – church gift software
DonorHub is managed by TntWare and is responsible for sharing information about donations and accounting systems with your staff. It integrates with fundraising management programs like TntConnect, MPDX, Karani, or DonorElf to automatically upload data on the system.
DonorHub generates an online report on current balances and transactions, eliminating the need for your office staff to add more work to their plate. The data is directly fed into DonorHub’s systems.
Features:
- DonorHub is fully reliable and secure and built on the foundation of Tntware applications.
- You can change your donating system without changing the support-raising tools for your staff.
Pricing: The cost of subscribing to DonorHub can be found here. They also have discounted prices if you qualify.
Servant Keeper – church gift software
Servant Keeper is the complete solution for your church database management needs. Its church gift software features contribution tracking, which keeps track of your donors and transactions quickly, efficiently, and accurately.
Features:
- Entry screens that enable easy recording of giving by name or envelope number.
- You create your own customized giving page.
- Donors can donate with an online check, debit card, or credit card – whatever suits them best.
- Auto-entry of any gifts previously given, saving time for employees.
- Comprehensive reports so you can quickly analyze the contributions.
- Helps audit trail by keeping track of everything before and after contributions.
- Links to any Quicken/Quickbooks compatible accounting program. No double entry is required!
- Enables paperless statements through email to save time and money and helps you “go green.”
Pricing: Servant Keeper pricing can be found here.
CallHub
Text-to-donate platform
CallHub is an excellent addition to the other church gift software solutions. It helps you reach out to donors and maintain cordial relationships to help you fundraise.
A text-to-donate campaign is a simple, uncomplicated way of getting your congregants to donate. Your supporters text a keyword to your number, and a link to the donation page is automatically sent to them. They must click on it and complete the form to complete the donation.
This makes it extremely easy for people to donate to the church compared to any other method.
All you need to do is set up the text-to-donate campaign and promote it across all your channels!
Here are some advantages of the text-to-donate campaign:
- Ease of donation process.
- Encourages receivers to donate immediately sitting on their couch or at their office desk – anywhere, anytime!
- Suitable for both big and small donations.
If you are prepared to implement your church-giving initiatives but are unsure about the platform, we suggest you try CallHub!
All the best for selecting the best church gift software for your church!