How to Transition Church Giving Systems Without Losing Donors
Image generated by Jared Belcher with DALL-E
Churches are more dependent on the generosity of online givers than ever before. Ours included.
During 2023, our church switched online giving platforms and not only did we retain all our existing donors, but we saved $10,000 in fees and a ton of staff time in the process. Today, I’ll share why we transitioned, who we switched to, and the steps we took to help all our donors shift from one platform to another.
Story Time: Our Church’s Online Giving Issues
In 2022, I was frustrated by our church’s online donation platform. I’ll just go ahead and tell you, it was Subsplash.
Now, Subsplash is actually a really great company and we have loved using them to build and host our mobile app since 2013. Their apps and media players are great. We’ve strongly considered them as our live streaming distributor and in 2017, we made Subsplash our exclusive online donation platform. There were several advantages to this- we got a great discount on our mobile app as well as their “Growth Curve” processing rate refunds every quarter. It was significantly better than the CCB online system we had used before.
We had even become one of their Subsplash’s poster churches and they did a whole feature video of our church on their website to advertise to potential clients.
In 2017, apart from giving, Subsplash didn’t have any other functions of a robust ChMS, so we used Planning Center Online for everything else: Scheduling volunteers, setting up small groups, checking in kids on Sunday mornings, and allowing people to register for church events. And for years, Subsplash played nicely with Planning Center. In fact, I’ve heard from sources that there was an attempted merger of the companies (which would have been GREAT for everybody!).
At some point, the friendship between those two companies became competition and we suffered from it.
Our first problem: The time cost to our church
Then the data stopped synching between platforms. Someone would give on Subsplash and we couldn’t get the donation to carry over to Planning Center. We had multiple calls with Subsplash’s tech support that didn’t help at all. We were wasting hours each month manually merging the data, one transaction at a time, between these systems. What seemed like a unusual bug at first dragged into weeks, then months, then a year.
Our second problem: The money cost to our church
After about a year of frustration, we got an email that the processing rates would be going up in 2023. That’s when we went into research mode.
What if we switched our online donation platform to Planning Center? All our people in our church were already in Planning Center, so it would be about as easy of a transition as possible. But more importantly, could it save us money?
Here’s how the numbers compared.
Processing Fee Comparison
At the time, Subsplash was charging a 1% rate on all ACH transactions and a 2.99% transaction fee on credit card donations. This was a big increase over the rates we paid when we signed up 5 years earlier. Of course, they advertise their “Growth Curve” feature, in which they give you money back each quarter based on your donation volume. But although we were processing about $1 million a year with them, our effective rate was still 1.94% per transaction in 2022.
Meanwhile, Planning Center Online charged 2.15% plus $0.30 for credit card transactions and no percentage of ACH gifts, just $0.30 per transaction.
So we did the math.
If we had processed online donations with Planning Center instead of Subsplash in 2022, we would have saved about $8,690 in fees, even with the Growth Curve refunds and exclusive donor discounts. Nearly ten thousand dollars that could have gone to ministry instead of to some financial company. As I’ll share in a minute, the savings ended up being even higher.
When you consider the financial cost plus all the time we were spending every month consolidating these transactions, plus the fact that all our congregants had two separate logins to manage... you can see why our finance team decided to make the transition in 2023 from Subsplash giving to Planning Center Giving.
Like many churches, we are so dependent on generous people donating online. There was a chance that just the friction of switching donation platforms might cost us a lot more than $8,690. But our finance team felt this change mattered enough to take the risk and trust our people to work with us on adopting the new system. We put a plan into place and moved carefully.
And it worked.
By the time our transition was complete, we saved $10,000 a year in fees, we saw increases in dollars given (both in-person and digital giving), in recurring giving commitments dollars, and in the percentage of total giving that’s digital.
The transition was a big win for us.
The rest of this blog post is what we did to help our people shift their donations from one system to another.
Our Transition Strategy: Clarity is Kind.
This transition from Subsplash to Planning Center would take place between January 1 - December 31 of 2023.
One of the mail outs we sent to donors explaining our transition and the financial fees. Click to download.
We felt that the best way to convince our donors to move online systems was to educate them on why the move mattered in the first place. As you’ll see in our timeline below, we were really upfront with people about how much money the church would save by moving to Planning Center. Our hope was to build trust in our church’s commitment to good stewardship.
We also set an artificial deadline for this transition. We needed a finish line to present to people, otherwise some people would never move their giving. In reality, there was no external pressure for us to complete it by a certain date - we could take as long as we needed. So even though our actual internal goal was to complete it by December 31, the deadline we presented to our donors was May 1.
By May 15, we had about 75% completion. By October, we had about 99.5% completion.
The “Transition” deadline I’ll be referring to from here on out was that artificial deadline of May 1.
Image generated by Jared Belcher with DALL-E
6 Months Before the Transition
Choosing the Right Platform: Choosing the right giving platform was a no-brainer for us. We already loved Planning Center as our ChMS and the transaction rates were so much lower than what we were paying before.
I’ll give one more point to Planning Center - their customer support is excellent. When I submit an issue, it might only be a few minutes later before they have a solution. It really feels like they care about their clients.
So for us, there wasn’t a question: We knew we wanted to move to Planning Center. For other churches, I’d recommend to do research and see your options! There are so many good ChMS out there who also process donations. I would simply recommend you don’t do separate giving and ChMS platforms, make it all the same platform. This will help you and your donors tremendously.
At this time, I did have a call with our client success manager at Subsplash to let him know that we were actively planning to leave. To his credit, he really did what he could to get us to stay. But our technical issues still went unresolved and the processing rates were still too high.
5 Months Before the Transition
Set the new system as our default: Beginning in January, before we even told our church about the transition, we went ahead and changed over all our default giving links to the new system. That way, anyone who tried to give online for the first time would already be using the new system.
To facilitate our regular online givers, we made a separate button that said, “Given online before 2023? Click here to use our old system.”
4 Months Before the Transition
Setup FAQ Webpage: The first piece of communication we developed was a “Giving Transition” webpage that explained the transition - why our church was moving platforms and a step-by-step guide for people. This webpage was promoted on our social media, our giving web page, and in our future communication about the transition. It became the main help hub for people. You can visit the webpage we made here.
Mail and Email to Donors: We sent all our online donors from the previous 12 months a letter (both in the mail and email) to carefully explain the reasoning for the move, the timeline, and the steps to move their gift.
This was also the first time we had ever publicly discussed the financial fees we pay based on the type of gift. This was a big win for us. We got a lot of feedback that went something like, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea giving with a card cost so much more than ACH or check.” As a result, a lot of people switched to giving methods that significantly reduced our overhead fees. People want more of their money to go to the church, of course!
1 Month Before the Transition
Personal Outreach: By 30 days out from our artificial deadline, about 65% of our donors with recurring gifts had already moved over. At this point, our operations director and I made a list of everyone who hadn’t moved over and began to personally reach out to help move them along. A few of them simply needed technical help, so this was a good opportunity for us to solve some problems alongside them.
Reminder Email: We sent out another reminder via email to all our online donors of the coming switch.
Transition Day
Link Swap On May 1, we swapped all the links on our website and mobile app to direct to the new system. We made a small button on the website giving page that people could use to access their account on the old system, but otherwise it completely disappeared.
1-5 Months After the Transition
Continued Support and Troubleshooting: By May 15, about 75% of our recurring donors had switched over. After the artificial deadline, we continued to personally reach out to donors who were still using the old system to help transition them to the new one. Usually there was a technical reason that was causing some trouble.
We realized these remaining givers needed a final push. So, near the end of this period as we circled 99% transition, we began to communicate a “hard cut off” date of October 31 to our few remaining recurring donors.
Image generated by Jared Belcher with DALL-E
5 Months After Transition
Hard Cut Off: On October 31, we removed any ability to give on Subsplash, whether with a link or recurring gift. But by October 31, I believe we only had three or four donors who hadn’t transitioned, and it appeared to be a situation where they didn’t want to continue to give for other reasons.
Transition Complete
After months of careful communication and support, we completed the transition from Subsplash giving to Planning Center giving in 2023.
Image generated by Jared Belcher with DALL-E
Review: How did the transition go?
In short: this transition went as well as it possibly could have.
Our credit card+ACH processing rate went from an effective rate of 2.41% (with Subsplash) down to 1.25% (with Planning Center). We processed $200,000 more in online donations after the transition, but spent $10,000 less on financial fees.
Effective Processing Rate
More online donations, more overall donations, and less financial fees.
What about our number of automatic monthly donors? Well, we actually have seen a small decrease in that number since our transition- about 9 fewer donors per month. But actually we think this is for a good reason - transparency.
When we sent out the information about how much we had to pay in processing fees, we had several people switch from being recurring credit card donors to sending checks every month through their bank (which costs them and us absolutely nothing). That’s still a win, even if they aren’t an “automatic donor” in the technical sense!
And there were a handful of people (less than 5) who never renewed their donations on the new platform - but these were people who were already pulling back for other reasons.
Now I will say we are still Subsplash clients for their mobile app. We still love that product.
Subsplash also has their own ChMS now to compete with Planning Center. It’s called Subsplash One and I can’t speak to how good or bad it is, and I’d assume you get a giving discount if you’re a Subsplash One client. Perhaps it’s worth looking into if you’re just now launching your church. There are many platforms for churches out there.
Overall, the transition and our “clarity is kind” approach was a big win for us and we’re very happy with Planning Center Giving. In fact, if I could do this all over, we would have been with Planning Center Giving since it launched in 2015.
Conclusion
Churches are more dependent than ever on online donations. Shifting platforms is frightening and a decent amount of work! If there is any question you have about our process or anyway I can help your church navigate this issue, please comment below!
I share how our church smoothly transitioned giving platforms in 2023, retained our donors, and saved over $10,000. Here’s our strategy!