How First Orlando grew to 8,000 giving households and raised $1M for their community in a single week

Summary

Church: First Orlando | Orlando, FL Type: Protestant | ~4,000 members Using Pushpay Since: 2017 Products: ChurchStaq (Pushpay Giving + Pushpay ChMS, formerly Church Community Builder)

KEY RESULTS

• Giving households: ~4,000 to ~8,000 (2x growth)
• Recurring giving: 6x increase in recurring-giving households
• Digital giving: 20% to 70% of total contributions

The situation

If your church management system runs on one person’s institutional knowledge, and everyone on staff quietly knows it, you’ve probably already had the conversation about what happens when they leave. The workarounds pile up. The spreadsheets get password-protected. And eventually the system stops serving the church and starts serving itself.

First Orlando lived in that reality for decades. Their system was originally built in the late 1970s and had been modified by successive staff developers over 30 or 40 years. Matthew Robinson, Pastor of Ministries & Administration, put it plainly: the platform had been “Frankenstein-ed” into a patchwork of custom databases and protected spreadsheets with a “segmented, hidden, You-Can’t-Touch-This nature.”

Every time a staff member left, a piece of institutional knowledge walked out the door with them. And as the congregation grew from 2,000 to 4,000 members, the cracks became impossible to ignore. Leaders, staff, and volunteers couldn’t collaborate. Data lived in silos. And the church’s ability to steward its people and resources was being held back by the very systems meant to support it.

First Orlando needed a modern platform that could scale with a growing congregation without requiring in-house developers to keep it running.

The church’s outdated systems also posed a challenge when it came to engaging with their growing congregation. As more people attended services and events, managing attendance, donations, and other important information became increasingly overwhelming. The team at First Orlando knew they needed a change in order to effectively serve and connect with their congregation in the digital age.

The solution

Matthew wanted a partner who would own the technology so his team didn’t have to. He said his primary focus was finding someone who gave them flexibility and customization without putting the burden of coding or software management on church staff. After evaluating their options, First Orlando chose ChurchStaq.

The results

The numbers tell a clear story, but what they really represent is a congregation that became more connected and more generous because the technology got out of the way.

But the most powerful proof of what changed at First Orlando isn’t in a spreadsheet.

In 2022, the church prayed over and issued a bold challenge to their congregation: contribute to the largest single-week offering in the church’s history, and give every dollar away. Members responded with over $1 million, most of it given on their phones through Pushpay. Those funds went straight back into the Orlando community through 30 nonprofit partners working on homelessness, food scarcity, and human trafficking recovery.

They did it again in 2023, even bigger. And they plan to keep going.

As Matthew describes it, “We talk about generosity at First Orlando as the good that we are able to do for Heaven here on Earth.” Pushpay didn’t create that generosity. But it gave the congregation a simple, trusted way to act on it.