Set Up Online Giving Safely

The January phone call

A donor calls in late January asking for last year's giving statement so she can file her taxes. The church generates one. It has her name, the amounts, the dates — and it is not valid as written acknowledgment, because it doesn't carry the church's legal organization name.

Nobody did anything wrong at the time. The giving setup went fine, donations arrived, everything worked. The gap only surfaces a year later, when it is expensive to fix and slightly embarrassing to explain.

The Foundations module on digital giving covered whether to accept online gifts at all and how to compare the true cost. This module is the setup itself, including the parts that only bite you later.

How the money actually moves

Worth understanding once, because it explains everything else. A donor enters a card. A payment processor — Stripe is the most common under the hood, whoever your church-facing provider is — authorizes it, takes a card-processing fee, and deposits the remainder into a bank account connected to your church.

Two fees are usually in play, and providers do not always present both clearly. There is the card-processing fee, typically around 2.9% plus a fixed amount per transaction, which goes to the processor. And there may be a platform fee on top, taken by whoever built the giving software.

Ask for both numbers explicitly before you sign up, and ask where the money lands. "Direct to the church's own account" and "held by the provider and paid out later" are meaningfully different arrangements, particularly if the provider ever has trouble.

Structure your funds before the first gift

A fund is simply a designation a donor can choose — General, Building, Missions, Benevolence. Set these up before you start receiving gifts, because re-categorizing donations afterward ranges from tedious to impossible.

Start with fewer than you think. Three or four is plenty for most churches, and every additional option is a decision you're asking a donor to make on a phone. "General" should almost always be the default and the first listed.

Be careful with designated funds you cannot actually honor. If you accept gifts for a building project that doesn't proceed, you have created an obligation. Only offer a fund your church is genuinely prepared to account for separately.

The statement details that decide validity

For a donor to use a gift as a charitable deduction, the written acknowledgment generally has to carry the organization's legal name, the amount and date, and a statement that no goods or services were provided in exchange — or a description and good-faith estimate of any that were.

That legal name is the piece churches most often get wrong, which is why the first Build module asks you to find it up front. "Grace Community" on the sign is not necessarily what belongs on the receipt.

Record your EIN too where the system allows it. And test the whole thing before you need it: make a small real donation to your own church, then generate the statement and read it as a donor and as an accountant would. Finding a missing legal name in March is a five-minute fix; finding it the following January is not. This is general guidance rather than tax advice — if you're unsure, your accountant will confirm what your statements need in about two minutes.

How the tools differ here

Standalone giving platforms — Givelify, Tithe.ly Giving, Pushpay. Giving is the whole product, so the giving experience is usually polished. It will sit separately from whatever else your church runs.

General payment tools — a plain Stripe or PayPal link. Cheapest in raw fees, and you get no church-specific features: no funds, no giving statements, no donor history. Someone will be building those in a spreadsheet.

Church platforms with giving built in — Breeze, Subsplash, Planning Center, and Faith Software's own myChelper among them, typically running on Stripe underneath with funds, donor history, and generated statements included, and platform fees that vary by provider and plan. The thing to compare is not the headline percentage but whether statements come out valid and where the money lands.

Your exercise

Before setting anything up, write down three things: your legal organization name exactly as it appears on your incorporation paperwork, your EIN, and the three or four funds you will offer. That is the whole prerequisite.

Once giving is live, make one small real donation yourself and take it all the way through to a generated statement. It is the only way to find out what your donors will actually receive, and it costs you the price of the test gift.