New initiatives to encourage generosity are having a significant and positive impact, as church services continue to take place online.
We recently reported the news of the Parish Giving Scheme’s new phoneline, where new donors can sign up to direct debit online. In the first 18 days of phone lines going live, there were 554 new donors, giving a total of £57k donations, including 18 donors from our own Diocese. There have been 55 new registrations of churches in lockdown, and several churches in the Bristol Diocese are in the process of registering.
Hundreds of churches have now downloaded the new giving animation, to encourage people to give to their church during lockdown. These videos have been enormously popular and the National team now has several more in the pipeline.
The new SumUp/GiveaLittle online giving platform on Parish Buying was launched on the 27th of April, and in the last three weeks over 200 new SumUp accounts have been set up which are enabling churches to facilitiate giving and stewardship at this time. This week’s SumUp and Givealittle report show a rolling 30-day figure of £82,850 worth of transactions being processed. This is a significant increase (of over 500%) on the same figure for the week ended 23rd of April with a rolling 30-day figure of just over £13k.
It is encouraging to see online giving making a difference, supporting parishes during lockdown, and also introducing giving facilities which will be of real benefit after lockdown too.
The national church webinars on online giving have been so popular, they’ve now added a few more dates, click the link to find one happening soon.
Stewardship also have a free treasurer dial-in; they’ve produced some really useful articles for churches during the crisis.
To get the very latest news, keep checking our special ‘stewardship during a time of isolation’ page, which we update very regularly, whenever we hear of something important and useful.