Name: 2025 State of Church Giving: Key Trends & Strategies for Growth
Uploaded: 2025-03-26T18:30:03.740Z
Duration: 52 min 20 s
Description: 2025 State of Church Giving: Key Trends & Strategies for Growth

Transcript for "2025 State of Church Giving: Key Trends & Strategies for Growth": Hello. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We're gonna get started here at the top of the hour. So just another minute or so as folks trickle in. Thank you so much for your messages already in the chat and letting us know where you're joining from, and what your role is. That's just helpful information for us to know who we're talking to. Also, we usually get asked this question, so I'm gonna go ahead and call it out now. We are recording this webinar, and I'll say this again as more people join, but we are recording this webinar. We will provide you a recording. Obviously, you've already found the chat. If you've got questions, we also have a q and a tab there at the top same panel at the top there, you'll see q and a. So if you would, make sure to drop your questions there in the q and a. That would help us out big time. Numbers are still climbing here, so we'll give it another minute. Welcome. Welcome. Got miss Trina in here. Hi, Trina. We got someone from Canada. That's amazing. Florida, that's my home state. Alright. Numbers are slowing down a little bit. So I'm gonna go ahead and remind everybody who just came in, hello. Welcome. We are sharing who you are, what your role is at your ministry, and where you are tuning in from for this webinar today. As a reminder, we are recording this webinar. We will send you the recording tomorrow. You can then share that with other leaders at your ministry. And if you've got questions today while you're joining us, you can put those in the Q and A tab. So, you'll notice at the top of the chat where everyone's chatting right now, there's also a q and a tab. You can pull that open if you'd like. That's where you'll ask your question. We've got our friend, Kristen, behind the scenes. She's helping us answer those questions. We'll get to those as quickly as possible. I will help her as well with some of our product questions, but we are just so thankful that you're spending time with us today. Hopefully, this webinar will be very helpful to you. Again, the big idea here is just to kinda understand the state of giving, over the last year and and generally where it's going in 2025, how you can align with that. So we'll go ahead and get started. I'm gonna just go to this next slide and and you can take a peek at who we are. So I'm Jess Moore. If this is your first webinar with me, welcome. I've been doing these webinars for, a few years. So been around, Ministry Brands for six years almost, and, I'm so thankful to be in a marketing role right now and be able to oversee these client facing webinars. And if you are not part of the Ministry Brands family yet, we would love for you to join us. But we're really thankful that you're here today. This information will be super valuable to you whether you are a part of our Ministry Brands family or not. This information is gonna be super practical. Joining me today are two friends from the parable group, and we'll talk a little bit more about the Parable Group and the involvement with today's webinar. But for today, I'm gonna let Catherine and Anna introduce themselves. Hello. I'm Catherine Nancy. I'm a senior digital analyst here at the Parable Group, and I've worked here for about eleven years helping faith based companies, brands, ministries optimize their strategy, enhance engagement with their audience, and drive greater impact for each of their unique missions. And I'm Anna Coraggio. I'm a technical digital analyst here at Parable Group, and I use my background in statistics and data analysis to uncover key trends and help faith based organizations make data informed decisions. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, ladies. Just to give everybody a little bit more context, in case you missed it, we recently released our 02/2025, '2 yes. That's right. Twenty twenty five. Two thousand '20 '5 sounded weird, but it's right. Right. Report for the state of church giving. And last year and then this year, again, we have partnered with the parable group. And as you can tell from these ladies and their what they do, they are incredibly knowledgeable in crunching data and then producing something that's consumable for you, so that you can make data informed decisions for your ministry, specifically in the giving realm. So that's what we have done with, the parable group. And then in addition to that, we're gonna just dive into today kinda some key points within the state of church giving report, and then we'll take a look at how you can adjust your giving platform to align with these trends, to continue to increase generosity at your ministry. So, without further ado, we'll go ahead and dive right in, and I'm gonna pass it over to you ladies. Yeah. And, Jess, tomorrow, they'll also receive a copy of the report. Is that correct? Correct. Yep. Yep. So, yeah, we'll talk about what you guys will get in your email at the very end of the webinar, but you're absolutely right. That is going to be a question that is asked. So, yes, you will receive a copy of this report, access to that, tomorrow when you receive the recording of the webinar as well. Yeah. Great. So let's begin with the big picture. Overall giving is up. In our survey of pastors and church leaders, fifty one percent of churches and parishes reported an increase in giving in 2024. You can see this in the pie chart on the left. Those who reported an increase in giving were asked, how much has giving increased in 2024? And their responses are shown in the bar chart on the right. The most common increase reported was between 47%, showing a steady growth in generosity. Even more encouragingly, some churches experienced over 15% growth year over year. And while giving patterns vary among churches and parishes, these results suggest that many churches saw financial stability or improvement in 2024. In later slides, we'll discuss some factors that contributed to this growth and explore strategies that you can consider to strengthen generosity in your own church and parish. When we reviewed Catholic parishes and Protestant churches, we saw similar overall trends. Fifty one percent of both groups reported an increase. You can see this reflected on both of the pie charts. The percentage of leaders reporting no change in giving in 2024 was also similar at 1819%. Among those that reported an increase, the most common growth range for this analysis was between 07%, indicating a moderate growth across both groups. Now when we dug deeper into digital donations from Ministry Brands' faith based customers, we saw some key differences. Catholic parishes saw more donations from recurring giving, while Protestant churches saw more giving through digital wallets. I'll explore this in more detail later, but it highlights an important takeaway. While overall trends can be similar, giving behaviors and individual preferences can often vary. Next, Anna will take a closer look at how digital giving impacts overall contributions and share some key insights from the data that we found. So let's go ahead and take a look at how digital giving has grown and the increasing role it plays in church donations. According to the data from Ministry Brands' faith based customers, 42% of total church giving in 2024 was processed through digital platforms. While this data is specific to Ministry Brands systems, it helps provide insight into how churches using these platforms are engaging with digital giving. Even more notably, digital donations through ministry brand systems grew by just over 5% year over year, suggesting that churches and their members may be increasingly utilizing digital giving options. Additionally, 61% of surveyed churches and parishes reported an increase in digital giving within their congregations, reflecting a shift among churches in this dataset. So if you take a look at the graph, we can compare the denominational trends trends using ministry brand systems. We saw varying levels of growth. Catholic churches on the left experienced nearly a four and a half percent increase, while Protestant churches on the right saw around a 4.2 or 5.2% rise in digital giving. The key takeaway, digital giving isn't just a trend. It's an expanding and essential part of generosity in today's churches. And more importantly, it doesn't replace traditional giving. It complements it, making generosity more accessible than ever. We'll kinda dive into how digital giving, how you can utilize and maximize the digital giving platforms that you have or options that you have within the ministry brands platform. But for now, in case you didn't already know, you should because this is the first page that pops up when you log in to your giving platform. But you do have this dashboard, and this allows you to look at your giving year over year. So you can play with the filters and take a look at that. You can isolate some of your gifts as well. And so if you have any interest in kind of finding out where you're at, just a bird's eye view utilizing this chart or this dashboard, you can do that from your dashboard. You can dig into deeper reporting, obviously, within your reports, and we can provide a link to reporting here in the chat here in just a second. But just baseline, just know you have this option within your giving platform right there on your dashboard. Okay. So now we are going to go ahead and do a quick poll. We wanna hear from you. Which digital giving methods does your church or parish offer? I'm gonna go ahead and open up this poll. You should see it pop up, and go ahead and select all that apply. We'll get you Yeah. On the right hand side, it's right there. You should have a little notification on the bottom left. But also on the right hand side where the chat is, there's now a new tab in the middle that says poll, and that's where you can select your options. Some votes are coming in. Oh, quickly too. We've got a very interactive crowd. Way to go, gang. We'll give everyone a second to fill this out before we can Yeah. Don't wanna distract you. About about half of the votes are in, it looks like. Okay. Okay. I might be slowing down now. Yeah. While we're waiting for the rest to come in, we'll go ahead and talk about our survey from pastors and church leaders. So we observed that web based giving is the most common option offered by 62% of surveyed churches. And taking a look at our poll results, that seems to be pretty consistent. It looks like automatic recurring giving and website giving are very head to head as being the most popular digital giving method that you and your churches offer. Other widely used methods that include automatic recurring giving and direct bank transfers are also looking to be pretty common in our poll. So interestingly, only 23% of responding churches to our survey offer digital wallets like Apple Pay or PayPal. So here I'm seeing about 35% offer digital wallets, so that's a little bit higher than the poll, or the survey that we conducted, which is great to hear. We love that people are using digital wallets. So while many churches are providing online giving options, the specific methods vary widely. Some, like web and recurring giving, are well established, while others, such as text to give and digital wallets, are still emerging in church giving strategies. In our survey, we observed about 30% utilized text to give, and here in our live poll, it's looking like around 35. So as digital giving continues to evolve, it may be worth exploring how expanding your church's giving options could better meet the needs of your congregation. So within our platform, we offer pretty much everything that was on that list. We offer digital giving methods through, our mobile app if you have that. We also offer kiosk giving, and that would allow your members to give from, obviously, kiosk within either the lobby of your church or parish, and then we obviously offer online and text to give. So if any of those, are appealing to you or if you haven't taken advantage of any of those features, please let us know in the chat, and we'll point you in the right direction. But it's clear that all of these are on the rise, and so, we would really encourage you to at least get more information if you're not maximizing all of these options. If you've got a multi generational congregation, it is important for you to consider providing all of these options for your people. Thank you, Jess. For this report, we categorized church sizes based on average weekly attendance into just three separate groups for small, medium, and large accordingly. And you can see that on the right for the size differences. When we analyze giving across these different church size groupings, we saw a clear pattern emerged. Medium and large churches were more likely to have experienced a an increase in giving overall in 2024 according to the survey of pastors and church leaders. Additionally, digital donation data from Ministry Brands' faith based customers showed that larger churches also saw a greater increase in digital giving in 2024. This suggests that growth strategies will differ depending on church size because what works for a larger congregation with more donors and staff will look different from the optimal approach for a smaller church with fewer resources. While medium and large churches led in digital giving in 2024, small churches stood out in a key area, recurring giving. According to those digital donations from Ministry Brands customers, small churches saw around 12% increase in recurring giving from 2023 to 2024, and medium and large churches saw around a 10% increase. The difference isn't dramatic, but it's noteworthy, suggesting that smaller congregations are embracing recurring giving as a way to sustain generosity. Meanwhile, large churches saw the largest increase in digital wallet giving between 2023 and 2024, but small and medium churches weren't far behind. And this is encouraging for all church sizes. You can see these results in the blue bar chart on the right. All of the increases year over year are nearly 100 or higher percent year over year. These results suggest that all churches will benefit from new digital giving options. When churches introduce a new or more ways to give, giving can grow. Of course, churches are unique in more ways than just their church size. But understanding all the trends that we cover in the report and even analyzing your own giving data can help you identify the strategies that will best fit your church or parish. Next, we'll do a quick poll about another critical factor that can influence generosity in in your church or parish, and that's age demographics. Okay. So we've talked about different ways that people give, but now we wanna see where this giving is coming from. So I'm gonna go ahead and open the poll. We would love to hear from you. What age group do you believe represents the majority of your church's giving? So, again, the poll should pop up in the bottom left corner or up in the top right next to the chat and q and a section. You can fill it out there. Select the option that best reflects your experience, and we'll compare it to our survey results. While they're filling that out, girls, we had, a question come in that I think would be helpful, for everybody attending. Do we know off the top of your heads what we categorized as small, medium, and large churches? How do we classify those? Is there a number that you guys can remember? Yeah. And we can hop I don't wanna leave the poll, but let me pull it up. Here. I can I have it on a separate tab? But Yeah. Small charges are between zero and two hundred and forty nine week average weekly attendance. So we're talking about averages, and these are self reported by the churches that we surveyed or through the donation data. Medium churches are between 250 average weekly attendance and then 999, just shy of a thousand, and large churches are a thousand and up. So when I'm saying medium and large churches, it's over 250 average weekly attendance. Awesome. That's super helpful. Thank you. Oh, and someone put it in the chat. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Faith. So helpful. It looks like most of our poll results are in. So let's go ahead and compare it. So according to our survey, most churches identified ages 45 to 59 and 60 to 74 as their primary giving groups. Together, that means nearly three quarters of survey churches report the majority of their giving coming from these groups. Now according to our live poll results, I am seeing a lot higher than that. It looks like I I can't do the math off the top of my head, but we're seeing I'll get it for you. 78. Yeah. Almost a 20. So 68%, it looks like. Yeah. 68% of those who filled out the poll see, the majority of their giving coming from this age group of 45 to 74, which again is very consistent with our poll results. Not surprisingly, only 1% of churches reported that eighteen to twenty nine year olds were their primary givers, and 16% of surveyed leaders said they weren't sure where which age group contributes the most. So in our live poll, it looks like we only have a few people that are unsure of where this giving comes from. 4%, which is great. Understanding who gives is just as important as knowing how they give. When churches have a clear picture of their donor base, they can tailor their engagement strategies and ensure they're meeting their congregations giving needs effectively. So looking more into this, we can see that when surveyed, only 16% of churches reported an increase in giving from the 18 to 29 age group. That's the graph all the way on the left side. And then when we look at the age group of 30 and up, we see around 34% of those churches saw an increase. This tells us that while younger donors may not yet be a primary giving group, some churches are successfully engaging them. So what are they doing differently? Well, that's exactly what we wanted to find out. We dug deeper into the data to see what strategies might be influencing younger donor engagement. What we found was one of the strongest statistical correlations was with digital wallets. Survey churches that offer digital wallets such as Apple Pay, PayPal, etcetera, were nearly twice as likely to report an increase in giving from younger donors. Yet despite this, only a third of surveyed churches currently offer digital wallet giving. That means many churches could be missing a valuable opportunity to engage younger donors in a way that aligns with how they prefer to give. This raises an important question. Is your church providing giving options that resonate with all generations? Younger donors may not be giving at the same levels as older generations, but churches that embrace modern flexible giving methods, like digital wallets, are more likely to see growth in this area. This will take us to our third poll. So we've seen how digital wallets can play a key role in engaging the younger donors, but we're curious how many of you actually use them. So let's go ahead and find out. Does your church currently accept donations through digital wallets like Venmo, PayPal, Google Pay, or Apple Pay? You should see that poll pop up again. Oh, let me close. Oh, looks like two of us are doing something at the same time. So let's open Digital Wallets. Go ahead and fill out the question, and we will look at those results in a second. Okay. Wow. We're getting lots of responses here. We are. I'm gonna real quick interject, ladies. We have lots of amazing questions that are coming in. A lot of these will need to be answered by Anna and Catherine. So this is what we're gonna do for you since they are in presentation mode and super focused right now. We will all of these questions will be captured through our platform, which is Goldcast, and they'll be able to see those questions, and they can address them. If we don't address them here today, they will be able to connect with you after the webinar. Those those questions will be available to us immediately after, and so, they'll make a point to reach out to you and answer any questions that we can't on our side as well. I'm here and happy to answer a lot of the product questions, but some of these report questions are a little trickier for me to answer. So, we are not ignoring you on purpose. We will get to your questions, but it may be after the webinar. Okay. And, also, at any point when Catherine and I are not presenting, we'll try to look through through those and answer any that we can. Looks like Catherine is already answering some. A couple. So, yeah, let's go ahead and look at our poll results. It seems like I'm seeing around 70 people answered yes, around 60 people answered no, and a few of you weren't sure. So this is pretty consistent with our survey, but actually a lot higher, which is great to see. So I think in our survey, around 20 to 33% of churches reported that they offer digital giving as a giving method. And here I'm seeing over 50% of you are answering well, of the people who responded, are answering, yes, that you do offer digital wallets. So this is really great news. Digital wallets, again, as we've already outlined, are a great way to engage younger donors and make giving more accessible for your church members. So Yeah. One note about the survey that the report is analyzing, it included other, platform users other than Ministry Brands customers. And so if other platforms don't offer the digital wallet giving, that could easily bring down that stat from what we're seeing, like, 50% from all of you and 20 to 33% in the survey. Okay. So if you haven't already taken advantage of the digital wallet options within your giving platform, hopefully, this little section has, inspired you to do so. We actually have a couple questions in the chat that I can answer live in regards to this. We have available to you, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Venmo at this point in time for our digital wallet stack within the giving platform. There is not an additional charge. The fees are the same as your credit card processing fees to utilize those, digital giving or, digital wallet options. And if that's not already enabled in your account, I'd be happy to help with that. If you would, please just, either drop it in the question or the chat, and I'll make a note of it and help coordinate that setup for you. We'd be happy to to do that. There there truly is no additional cost in addition to the regular processing fees, and, it's it's pretty important at this point that you do incorporate those if you have anyone in your congregation, within that younger subset. Even people that are not within that subset. Right? Even older people are maximizing digital wallets. It's so easy. And just quickly, in the small chance that someone doesn't really fully understand what a digital wallet is, that's totally okay too. Briefly explaining that, it's kind of like a real wallet, but it's obviously digital. It's on your computer. But Google, Venmo, PayPal, and Apple Pay, what they do is they will save your payment method as if it's just if it's locked in there, it's very secure. And then what you can do is select, your donors will select whichever digital wallet option they prefer. Then they'll quickly put in their login credentials to that payment method, to that digital wallet, and they can access a saved card. So this is helpful for a number of reasons. One, it's very convenient and super quick for your donors, but, also, it removes some of the error. Right? They're not typing their entire credit card number with their thumbs on their phone. They can very quickly pull from what's already saved there. So, hopefully, you're using these in other ways that you're paying for things, but if you haven't already set them up, first of all, set them up for yourself because it's incredibly convenient. I barely shop with anything other than Apple Pay these days, but also for your congregation, just keeping in mind how easy and convenient that is. You want to provide the best experience for your donors, and digital wallets definitely increases how well they can give, and their their experience. I don't think we've talked about stocking crypto too. We do have that option as well. So if you're interested in getting that set up, you can also reach out to us for that. I think we'll talk about that a little bit more later maybe. I don't remember if we're talking about stocking crypto. But, it's showing on this form. It shows on that the phone, you can see it there in the top right corner of that giving form on the phone. So that's another option as well. We'd be happy to help you get that set up. And somebody asked a question about if we have data showing if you could jump back one slide, that'd be great. Data showing donations before offering digital wallets and after. This report didn't dive into that on a church level, church size basis. But, overall, ministry brands added two additional digital giving wallet options digital wallet giving options. Sorry. It's a mouthful. Mhmm. And giving through digital wallets for ministry brands customers doubled year over year. So that shows you when you offer it, when you encourage it, and when people start using it, how it can really grow your giving. Yes. Thank you, Catherine. I got distracted by my own images. The other important update too, I recently added this because, y'all, this is, like, brand new, hot off the press. If you were already utilizing Venmo for your donors as a payment method, you may have noticed that we originally released this without the the recurring giving functionality. We had work to do on the backside with Venmo, and that has been completed. So as of today, ladies and gentlemen, we now offer Venmo, and it supports recurring giving. We've offered Venmo. Now you can do recurring giving. So if you haven't already shared with your congregation, and maybe this is another piece to it, make sure that they're aware that you now offer, you know, digital wallet options. This may be a really good way for you to reintroduce that. Hey, friends. We've now we're now allowing you to give give through digital wallets, and we would love to encourage you to try those out. If you already gave through Venmo, now you can set up recurring gift for your convenience, yada yada yada. It's a great kind of segue into talking about giving without just asking for money again, but re reminding them that there is other options, new options for their convenience. Okay. So more about digital wallets. When it comes to digital wallet giving, both Catholic parishes and Protestant churches are embracing this newer digital donation method, but there are some key differences. So based on Ministry Brands digital donations, Protestant churches in 2024 received a higher percentage of digital giving from digital wallets. That's the orange chart. That's not an arrow at 2%. But when we look at year over year growth, which are the arrow charts on the far right, you can see Catholic parishes have a much larger increase in digital wallet giving at 232 year over year. And this is double that of Protestant churches. So if this trend continues, the adoption rate of digital wallet giving for Catholic parishes and Protestant churches will soon be similar. Give you some time to look at those charts. So this highlights an important takeaway. As we've already talked about, digital wallet giving is growing, younger people, but also more tech savvy older people. And while some churches or parishes may have started sooner, late adopters are quickly gaining momentum. While Protestant churches reported a higher digital wallet usage than Catholic parishes, the opposite trend can be seen with recurring giving. So in this report, and I think this was one of the questions, recurring giving refers to automatic digital donations. Because I I know in person can be recurring, but when we're talking about recurring giving in the report, it's just focused on digital donations that were set up for weekly, monthly, or another set frequency through a digital platform. And this recurring giving itself can be a key driver of financial stability for many churches. In 2024, '40 '2 percent of the digital giving for Ministry Brands customers came from recurring giving. And this just shows how consistent contributions can play a major role at 42% for church finances. For Catholic parishes, recurring giving is even more significant at 76% of their digital donations coming from automatic recurring giving. And this is double what we're seeing across Protestant church digital giving. But Protestant churches are closing the gap. So year over year, Protestant churches saw 13% increase in recurring giving compared to a smaller 5%, but still significant increase for Catholic parishes. So these insights, both about digital wallets and recurring giving across Catholic parishes and Protestant churches suggest that churches of all types can benefit from having multiple digital giving options and encouraging multiple digital giving options to help meet the needs of their individual church members or parishioners. So next, Anna's gonna share an important survey finding about recurring giving. So beyond digital donation data, we also analyzed recurring giving trends through our survey, and the results highlight an important opportunity for churches. Survey churches that offer recurring giving were nearly twice as likely to report an overall increase in giving. But despite this, only 54% of surveyed churches currently offer recurring giving. This means that nearly half of churches may be missing an opportunity to create more consistent and sustainable generosity. If your church doesn't yet offer recurring giving, it's worth considering, not just as an option, but as something to actively encourage among your members. By making it easy and showing its impact, churches can ensure steadier giving throughout the year. Also, I wanna address a q and a question I saw when I was reading through, and I accidentally deleted it somehow. I'm not really sure how. But someone had asked how we define recurring giving and whether this is through all different type of giving methods. And so Jessica might be able to answer more. I think she mentioned something about how Venmo is the newest addition to this recurring giving platform. But we defined recurring giving as an automatic payment at some sort of set frequency. So whether this be once a week, once a month, biannually, however your church sets it up, that is kind of what we consider recurring giving. So anything that's automatic. Hopefully, that helps answer the question that I accidentally deleted. Sorry about that. Yeah. Anna, that's exactly right. That is exactly how we define it on our platform as well. We can jump to the next slide. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. So in our platform, you can allow donors to set up the frequency on their own. They can even begin their recurring gift at a later date. If they want to, we also have a pledges feature also known as campaigns or goals. You can change that terminology depending on how your ministry talks about it. But you do have the option to facilitate recurring giving in whatever capacity at your ministry through our forms. Additionally, if you are here and you are a church leader and you would like to increase the usage of recurring giving, at your ministry, you can turn recurring giving to default as the first thing they'll see on their form. So when they go in to make their gift, you can default to recurring giving. Again, this is in alignment with essentially the way that our culture facilitates even payments. So, if you are paying your bill for your air conditioning or your power, a lot of times, the option to set up a recurring payment, is in place for your convenience so you don't have to think about it. I mean, when I was a kid, my mom would write a check, right, and she would send it in the mail. Now this is just such a significantly more, convenient process. We do have some ministries that are a little hesitant thinking like, hey, we want this to be a conscious decision. So for your convenience, your donor will receive a thank you email right away. This is the way that my husband and I give to our church. We have it set up on recurring giving. When I see that email come through, I pray over my gift the same way that I would if I were making that decision for a onetime gift or making that gift right there at my church. So this is incredibly helpful. I think this is an underutilized feature of our platform most of the time because it is under shared from the pulpit. I think that we we are hesitant to kinda talk about this within our services, and so I would really encourage you, to remind your folks that this is an option. Again, it is so convenient. It is so wonderful. It allows for faithful stewardship without having to think about it or, again, punch in their credit card every single Sunday, when your when your donors give, it does set up an account for them. They can log in and access other saved payment methods if they'd like, but, of course, recurring giving, is the number one most convenient way to make those gifts. The other thing you can do if you'd like to increase recurring giving usage at your ministry is you can set up this prompt that will pop up after a one time gift. And so it litter it's very gentle. It's just a reminder. Hey. Did you even know this was an option? Would you like to make your gift recurring? They can set up the frequency right there, the amount. They can select which funds they'd like to give to. So those options are currently within your platform. The giving prompt, putting recurring giving on as default as well as that prompt can both be activated within your forms builder on a per form basis. So, that's the other important thing. If you don't want this showing on every form, that's totally fine. You would just go into your form properties into the payment tab, and we can send some, articles to help you some, support articles to help you set that up as well. But these are really great features. One is a little bit more proactive. The other is a little bit more, you know, just coming alongside and and setting a gentle reminder. So whatever you're comfortable with, but please, please don't shy away from talking about recurring giving at your ministry. I was a little disappointed that I didn't know about it until I started working here at Ministry Brands, and I was like, oh my gosh. I wonder if my church does this. Sure enough, they did. We also got a question kind of related because it's in the form setup as well. We had had a question come through that asked if donors can help offset the processing fee of their gifts, and the answer is yes. That can also be set up in the same place in a per form basis. They could go you would just go to the form properties and the payment tab, and you can make all those adjustments there. So, hopefully, this helps encourage you to take advantage of this feature if you haven't already. Alright. So our survey also revealed additional ways that churches can encourage generosity and strengthen financial health. So how can churches increase giving? Well, surveyed churches that implemented at least one of the following strategies were more likely to have seen a giving increase. The first being having transparent communication about financial needs and how donations are used. Another big one was encouraging members to set up recurring giving, making generosity a consistent habit, like we just talked about. And the final one I wanna mention is reaching out through emails, mail, and other donation appeals to keep giving at the top of the mind. The bottom line is communication matters. When churches clearly express financial needs and make giving more simple and accessible, they create more opportunities for generosity. So next, we'll explore another important ways that churches can support their members in giving, which is by removing barriers to digital donations. One survey, church leaders identified some of the top obstacles to online giving. If you take a look at the chart here, we can see that the top one is the lack of familiarity with technology. Some members may be hesitant to use digital platforms if they aren't really sure how to use them. Another big one is security concerns. Donors wanna feel confident that their information is protected, and sometimes with digital giving, they're not so sure it is. Another big one we saw was users not wanting to create an account or log in. A complicated process of any kind can discourage giving. So the good news is that all of these barriers can be addressed through thoughtful adjustments to your website, donation forms, and overall communication. The goal is simple. Make giving as easy and transparent as possible. By streamlining the process and addressing concerns proactively, churches can help more members feel comfortable engaging in generosity. Let's now take a look at how different giving platforms may impact overall giving growth. According to our survey, churches and parishes that used Ministry Brands' Giving Solutions were more likely to have seen an increase in giving and new donors. In fact, 64% of churches using ministry brands giving reported an increase in digital giving compared to 45% of churches using a different platform. You can see that visualized with the bar graph on the right. It's important to note that digital giving is not replacing traditional giving. There was no significant difference between groups in terms of increases in cash or check giving, where 22% of Ministry Brands users and 23% of non users reported growth in the traditional methods. So this reinforces a key theme that we've seen throughout the entire report. Digital giving isn't about replacing traditional generosity. By offering multiple ways to give, churches can meet their congregates where they are and encourage broader participation. Next, we'll explore how a complete giving and engagement solution can further enhance generosity. So let's look at how churches can take their giving efforts even further with additional support. Churches that recently switched to managed giving saw, on average, a 28% increase in digital giving based on digital donation data. Managed giving is designed to help churches increase recurring giving by making generosity more consistent and predictable, managing costs by streamlining operations and maximizing church resources, and creating new income sources by expanding opportunities for financial growth. For churches that may feel limited by time, staffing, or administrative constraints, managed giving can provide the tools and support needed to strengthen financial health while making generosity easier for both churches and their congregations. So let's take a look at what managed giving is. We have managed we have these types of options for both our parish clients as well as our our Protestant church clients. On the parish side, this is called managed giving, and this has been around for oh, I think we've been doing managed giving for at least maybe two years. I'd have to double check that. But, that's where the statistic that Anna just discussed with us came from. This is real experience of our real clients, that are utilizing managed giving. And for for those of you that don't know what it is, we do offer offer mailers. So, essentially, the the program is, we will send out mailers for you. We will provide some marketing material for you, and there you can see on this slide, we've got, a it's called a buckslip, but you can put that, there within the church, within the pews. We also have this poster where you can invite folks to engage with digital giving through the QR code. It explains the giving options. These are already created for you. You can personalize them to your ministry by adding a logo, but these are included within that program. Additionally, we align with seasons of giving in the liturgical calendar to also provide for you liturgical specific or season specific assets that you can distribute to your congregation. You can choose. We've got social media images, as well as this is so very tiny on my screen. The Pew cards, bulletin inserts, and we even have the option to have these materials in Spanish. So, this is an incredible opportunity, for those of you, like Anna said, that may be limited in time and want to take advantage of this feature. And then for the Protestant side, we now offer accelerated giving. So very similar, but this is going to reflect the branding a little bit differently on our giving platforms for our Protestant churches. A lot of the functionality behind the scenes is the same, but there are some minor differences just to align with essentially calendars for each of those, types of churches and ministries. So we align more closely on the Protestant side with maybe a seasonal calendar like, you know, this summer slump when you experience some dips in giving over the summer. We can help bolster giving through utilizing this accelerated giving program. So, again, if you are interested, we're gonna have, a slide our next slide, actually, I'll go ahead and jump to that. We have QR codes here. And if you're familiar with using QR codes, you can scan these. This is this this QR code is gonna take you over to, full disclosure, our demo page, and, both obviously engagement with our our giving platform as a whole. If you are interested in adding this to your stack of technology for your ministry, you can scan this QR code. So really, truly, this is if you are not a Ministry Brands client and you would like to add Ministry Brands giving, you can scan this QR code. If you are an a ministry brands client currently, either through our ministry brands giving platform on the Protestant side or ParaSoft for our Catholic and parish clients, you can also scan these to learn more about managed giving or accelerated giving. So let me make a very clear delineation. If you are an existing client and you just wanna find out more about the digital wallet options, you already have those. There's no reason to scan this QR code for those. We will just show you how to enable them. Well, we're not gonna show you in this demonstration, but we would love to help you enable those already in your platform. So, again, these QR codes are if you would like to adopt ministry brands, giving solutions for your ministry, or the managed giving and accelerated giving. Plea please scan the respective QR code that represents your ministry best, and then, we will make sure to follow-up with you on those things. I am going through these questions as quickly as I possibly can for, enabling your, additional payment methods. You should be able to go to your settings, menu within your platform, and you can check boxes for payment methods there. If you're not already familiar, I will provide as I I'm gonna actually just drop it into the chat the, the link to enable those if you do not see all of the payment methods we talked about. So if you only see Google Pay but you don't see Apple Pay, that may require our team to intervene and make sure that we can add that to your account. But in the meantime, that's the majority of the questions that I'm seeing, and I'm so excited that you all wanna take advantage of this feature. So I'm gonna drop that link in the chat, and then I think we've got a survey next. So I will let Anna or Catherine handle that. Okay. So this survey is just for you to I'm sorry, Anna. Would you like me to take this one? Either way is fine. I saw it in the in the side panel. Yes. I'm I I was thinking it was a poll because I saw the little graphic. Sorry. This survey actually is not for Anne or Catherine. This is for me, personally, me and then our marketing team to know how to better serve you through these types of webinars. So, we actually cannot see these replies right now. I'm gonna go ahead and launch the survey for you all to take advantage of that. The survey really is just trying to find out more, about what you wanna see when we do these types of webinars. Hopefully, this has been, helpful to you. We're obviously wrapping up this session, and I will continue to answer questions as best as I can. And then if not, we'll get to those, via email. But right now, this survey is tremendously helpful. I appreciate your engagement today. You all have been wonderful with the polls. I know we're asking a lot of you, but truly, this allows us to bring you good content. So if you enjoyed this today, let us know. Let us also know if you're interested in taking advantage of any of the offerings that we talked about today. And I just want to, while you all are filling that out, thank Anna and Catherine so so much for joining me. This was super informative. I I glanced through the report, but hearing you guys dive in is so helpful and so practical. So really appreciate your time today. I look forward to hopefully doing another one with you guys at some point in time. This is also one of the first webinars that we have done with both our Catholic and Protestant friends within the same room. So, I love seeing everybody here, and engaging. Again, I hope this was informative and helpful to everyone. I am going to, wrap up with this. Like we mentioned, you are going to receive an email tomorrow. It's going to include the webinar recording and a link to the report. You can reply to that email if you would like, and we will get to your comments or questions. But in the meantime, I will just export all of these beautiful questions and make sure that Anna and Catherine get them as well, and you can look forward to hearing from us individually, to answer those questions as best as we can. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and close out that survey. And thank you so much for attending, friends. I hope that you have a really wonderful day.