New Ways to Enhance the Way Members Interact with Your Church

Your church leaders and staff can’t do it alone. In fact, if you’re like most churches we talk to, you rely on your givers, volunteers, other ministries, non-profits, and even charitable partners in your community to help you thrive. 

For over 7,500 churches nationwide, Pushpay is honored to be one of those partner organizations. And we serve our customers not only with a world-class giving and engagement platform but with a commitment to continuous improvement.

That’s why we spent the summer refining our giving and engagement platform to better serve your vision and mission. Here are the features we built to help enhance member interaction with your church, increase giving, and streamline your administrative workflows.

Attitude Poll

Sometimes a church operates for years before staff gets wind of the fact that the music is too loud for some members or that parking lot attendants sometimes leave their posts early, leaving drivers to fend for themselves. The thing is, your job isn’t just to propel your ministry forward, but also to ensure that the church environment is healthy, functioning, and inclusive.

But most churches don’t have a way to anonymously get people’s feedback to improve the church experience as a whole.

In-app attitude polls allow churches to engage and gather feedback from their communities in a fast, intuitive way. In just a few clicks, your church can survey the entire congregation anonymously and review the feedback in real-time in the mobile app studio. This gives you a snapshot into congregational health, satisfaction, and more.

With this feature, you give your community a voice to provide comments that help shape the future of your services, content, events, etc. Plus, the ability to offer feedback encourages congregant engagement by giving people a greater sense of ownership over the church’s direction and experience.

App Rich Text

Within most church apps, the options for customizing text are limited. But ministries don’t just want to stick with templatized text—so we wanted to offer them more. New updates allow customers to format their in-app text in a more flexible, customizable way. The new text editor options include quoting styles, different text sizes, lists, indents and outdents, dividers, and insert link options.

The new style and formats will help catch the eye of your church app users, increase app engagement, and allow for even more creativity in messaging. In addition, the ability to insert links into the text editor will improve in-app communication.

Donor Campaign Progress

During our winter product launch, we launched a pledging feature that allows donors to promise gifts to specific fundraising campaigns. With the donor campaign progress tool, givers can now monitor their personal progress toward pledges and campaigns. Donors will be able to view their transactions and recurring gifts and make adjustments if needed, giving them greater control and an increased sense over ownership of their contributions to your ministry. 

Church leaders also have visibility into pledge progress and can send customized messages to remind donors of their commitments. Research shows that once donors are reminded of their commitment, the church often sees an increase in gift volume to the campaign. 

This feature doesn’t just help increase generosity but it saves administrative time and resources. Now donors can view their pledge and campaign progress on-demand, instead of requesting updates from church staff. 

Self-Access Giving Statements

Churches increasingly prefer self-access giving statements—and for good reason. The time and effort required to manually print and send giving statements, or pull statements ad-hoc are substantial for churches for all sizes. 

This new feature gives donors a single location to view and download current and historical giving statements, issued by their church, from a secure Logged-In-Web (LIW) experience. 

Since donors have to log onto their donor portal to view statements, churches can better convert offline donors to online givers by offering a new channel for receiving church-related financial information. When you announce this new capability to your congregants, you can also encourage them to start making donations using the church’s mobile app after reviewing their giving statement.

Shelby Arena Integration

The summer launch is a great time to not only be a Pushpay customer but a Shelby Arena partner church as well. Previously, customers could only exchange Pushpay data with Shelby Arena via a native file export. The new integration removes this step to create a seamless data transfer that no longer requires staff involvement.

If your ministry partners with both organizations, the integration prompts the Pushpay platform to automatically send transaction data to your Shelby Arena instance. Transactions are automatically matched to the people records of donors in Shelby Arena, or if the giver is new and doesn’t have a record in Arena, a new one will be created for them. This new integration effectively reduces administrative workload previously spent on manual data manipulation.

Not-for-Profit Giving Statements

Last but not least, the summer launch includes a new feature that enables non-profits to generate receipts for donations that clearly display the organization’s tax-exempt status. Now, donors will receive receipts that clearly record the donation value, allowing them to maintain accurate personal accounting records. Additionally, these statements give donors insight as to how their donations are impacting their community. 

And on the administrative side, this new feature decreases manual and ad-hoc administrative workload to prepare and send annual and/or reprinted statements.

The Pushpay team is filled with engineers, product marketers, customer success agent, and countless others who are all on your side, listening for new ways we can support your church’s mission. Our summer product launch is just one unveiling of new features that were inspired by your feedback.

For more updates on tools we design to nurture community member engagement, giving and connection, talk to one of our church tech experts today.