3 Reasons Churches Trust Their Biggest Services to Pushpay

On Easter, Your Giving App Should Be the Least of Your Concerns

Your church likely just had the biggest worship service you’ll host all year long. Easter is huge. That means you and your staff had lots of moving parts to manage.

You also likely had a busy few weeks as you prepared for all of this, and if there’s one thing you can’t afford to worry about, it’s your technology.  On any day, but particularly on this day, your technology should just work. And it should just work seamlessly behind the scenes so you can focus on what’s most important: The people attending your church in person and online.

A Great Weekend for the Churches We Serve

We have the privilege of serving over 7,100 churches who had a fantastic weekend ministering to the needs of their community on the front lines. They raised tens of millions of dollars to fund their good work around the world—and they did it through a personalized, always-on experience that allowed their members and congregants to participate in their church’s mission, whether that’s in the community or on the other side of the world.

We saw some amazing stats come in from this weekend. Many of our churches had a jaw-dropping number of people show up to hear the Easter story. People were baptized. Marriages were restored. Families were put back together.

We know for every number reported, for every dollar given, lives were changed. And we’re celebrating today with all of those churches.

These are the stories that should be on your mind the week after Easter—not whether or not the mobile app was “live” when you put out the call to contribute.

On big weekends like the one we just completed, our customers repeatedly tell us they need three things to be in place to serve their congregations:

First, the Platform Needs to Work—and to Scale—to Accommodate All the New Visitors Coming through Our Doors 

Now, we know that you’ve done this for years. When your church heads into a big weekend like Easter, you get more volunteers, you may hire some part-time staff, and you may increase your budget for that season.

Bigger needs require more resources.

We do the same thing. Church attendance typically doubles on Easter weekend. That means our customers have more users and bigger needs than usual. Thanks to our relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) we are able to scale up our platform capacity during a busy weekend like Easter when our customers needed it the most. Then, to be a better steward of their resources, we scale them back at times when the needs are lower.

That means on Easter Sunday you won’t have to worry about maxing out your app or your giving solution. Your app’s capacity will grow with you.

Next, if Something Does Go Sideways, I Need Someone on the Line ASAP to Fix the Problem 

You should never call your app’s customer support team and have to wait until Monday for a response, particularly on the “Super Bowl” of church weekends.

When problems arise, you need an app provider that works on your schedule—not one that makes you work on theirs. You need customer support available on Easter Sunday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and every Sunday of the year.

Our customers demand enterprise-level support all week long. That means whenever their churches meet, whenever someone in their communities wants to give, or whenever a person downloads their app, they want to be assured our technology will work. To that end, our engineering team is monitoring our systems and on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to ensure we never miss a moment!

We’re also constantly monitoring a large amount of data and alerts that help us understand what’s working and what’s not working on our platform. That means when a problem does comes up, we’ll usually see it before you do.

Finally, I Need to Know Our Solution Can Capture All the Acts of Giving, even if Something Goes Down or Is Offline. Every Dollar Counts to Make Our Mission a Success.

Processing a digital gift can be complicated. It has multiple steps—at times downstream processor outages can wreak havoc on giving. These hiccups could potentially cost your church in donations on big days like Easter or Christmas. When members of your community open up their app to make a donation, they expect their gift will get to you. When downstream problems get in the way of their generosity, your church often doesn’t get a second chance. Trust has already been eroded, and now that little voice in their heads begins to wonder whether their money is safe with you. Maybe they’ll give elsewhere. Worse yet, maybe they’ll give nowhere.

Our customers today are assured when a downstream processing error occurs, all gifts are queued and processed once the outage is resolved. And even better, all of this happens without any action by our customers or the giver.

Just this past Easter Sunday, a downstream issue put a pause on 4,300 payments (with a total value of $500,000) from churches on the Pushpay platform. That’s a lot of generosity that could have been lost! Thanks to this new product feature, our customers received every penny their donors intended them to get, and nobody had to be asked to “try their gift again.”

Pushing for More Successful Churches

We couldn’t be more excited to hear the reports of what happened through the churches we serve on Easter Sunday. When they succeed in fulfilling their mission, we succeed at ours.
If you’d like to learn more about partnering with Pushpay for your church’s mobile giving solution, we’d love to speak with you!