During the last few months most of us had to make a shift to online worship for a time, and with that many of your members continued their support by making their gifts through your online giving provider. As your team is reconciling bank statements they are seeing the growing deposits of online gifts and a growing number for transaction fees.
It costs money to process electronic payments. There is no way around that, but you can take steps to decrease the impact of those fees.
1) Educate your donors that there is cost to the church to provide electronic giving options. Some of them may not realize it. Let them know that the most economic form of payment for the church is ACH/eCheck and ask them to consider that rather than a credit/debit card.
2) Offer your donors the option to help offset the transaction fees by enabling the “Convenience Fee feature.” In ShelbyNext Giving you have the options to offer your donors the opportunity to increase their gift to help offset those transaction fees. This can be offered as a percentage or a flat dollar amount. You as the ministry can choose the amount to offer. This can be set as optional or required.*
Learn More about Enabling this Feature
*We encourage you to check with a financial professional on state or local guidelines for convenience fees for charitable giving.
3) Consider the convenience fee for those non-giving forms. Since the convenience fee is set on the form level it can be adjusted form by form. Maybe on Giving you won’t use this, but for events, conferences, weekly meals, etc. it could be a helpful feature.
Giving and making payments electronically will likely continue to grow, so consider how your ministry can make the best use of the features available to you.
If your current online giving provider does not allow you to enable convenience fees, click HERE to learn more about ShelbyNext Giving.