9 New Ways To Nurture Your Church’s Member Journey With Pushpay

The Church has been using technology to solve important problems for generations. Leaders have used the Gutenberg printing press to publish the Bible to help spread the good news and Billy Graham televised his sermons to fill the airwaves with the message of salvation.

Today, churches are using social media, websites, and cutting-edge apps to not only distribute the good news but also engage with their communities and transform lives. We at Pushpay are privileged to partner with 7,500+ churches nationwide to provide them with the kind of tools that’ll help them fulfill their mission more effectively.

And in keeping with changes in tech and culture, we’re constantly upgrading our platform with better, faster, more effective tools to serve the Church.

This spring, we’re launching a number of new features designed to nurture church donors, drive engagement, and simplify giving for churches that struggle with too many giving platforms. Here’s what you can now expect from the Pushpay platform…

Richer church app experience

Content Cards

After someone donates, they’re still thinking about your church. Maybe they’re thinking about your pastor’s recent message on generosity or what their funds will be used for. Regardless, your ministry will linger on their mind. So after a gift, we recommend giving donors some valuable next steps to keep them engaged. Content cards in your custom church app from Pushpay allow you to do that.

Content cards will now appear on the thank you receipts and emails your members get after they donate. These are icons that display recent content from within your church app, giving the donor a next step to continue interacting with your church. After they give, they’ll be more likely to click into a content card displaying a recent sermon from a guest preacher or whatever other content was recently uploaded into your church app.

While someone is still thinking about your church, content cards give them an opportunity to engage even more deeply with your ministry.

Rich push notifications

Forward-thinking churches are exploring more and more unique ways to reach their community in a noisy environment. Everyone’s distracted and attention spans are shrinking by the year. That’s why we were so excited to launch in-app push notifications last year.

This year, we’re taking it a step further with rich push notifications.These allow ministries to even more effectively capture people’s attention by adding photos right into a push notification and making them more personalized. These more relevant images and structured content help drive user engagement and increase retention of the information you’re trying to communicate to your congregants.

App badges

Your church just released one of your pastor’s most convicting sermons. It’s blasted across each social platform. It’s sent out in an email and posted on the website. It’s also uploaded to the church app.

But no one knows that it’s on the app yet. And fewer people than expected end up actually viewing the recording.

Even though many attendees have the app, few knew the sermon was ready for viewing. That’s where app badges come in. They allow your app to automatically “raise its hand” and alert app users that a new piece of content is ready and available.

The little red badge that will appear on your church app icon when a new piece of content is available gently (subconsciously) urges your user to open up the app and see what’s new. This seemingly small addition is a mighty tool for ministries wanting to drive engagement and nurture a deeper connection between a church and its community.

Related content

Bloggers do this extremely well: They make it easy for readers to find related content. Now churches can use the same strategy to encourage app users to engage more deeply with the church’s message, mission, and content.

Related content is a new tool that surfaces similar pieces of information to app users, resulting in additional content being consumed and longer app engagement. Maybe there’s a series of classes on finances at your church. This new feature allows you to group them together in a logical way that makes it easy for people who take Finance 101 to find follow up resources and worksheets related to that theme.

Donor Nurture

Donor campaign progress

With Pushpay giving, churches can create fundraising campaigns quickly and easily. However, a campaign can be much more effective when a pledging tool is attached to it. People are often drawn to pledging since it allows them to commit to radical generosity, even if they aren’t able to give above and beyond right when the giving talk happens. Churches can not only allow congregants to submit a pledge, making generosity even easier but they can also manually send reminders to pledgers who might be falling behind schedule. Once donors are reminded, churches often see a spike in the transaction volume to the campaign. Givers can even log into their giving account and view their progress toward the pledge.  

Donors will also be able to track their progress toward the monetary goal they pledged to. This gives them a deeper sense of ownership over the part of the overall campaign they’re responsible for. It also inspires even more generosity and a sense of accomplishment when the pledge is fulfilled and the campaign hits its goal.

Impact Cards

The people at your church aren’t just passive bystanders to the work you and your team do—they’re active participants. And that means there are probably countless opportunities to shed light on the impact they’re having through various ministry programs and activities. Impact cards are your church’s opportunity to shed light on the incredible work being done.

These function similar to your dynamic home screen within your custom church app and allow you to make specific pieces of information more visible to your community. Churches can use it to surface the results of recent ministry efforts, photos from a recent backpack drive, or key statistics related to a fundraising campaign the community member recently donated to.

This level of transparency is not only prudent and well-deserved by your congregants, but it helps to energize them to the mission of your church and drive even more generosity and app engagement.

Thank you by fund

Thanking donors is a no-brainer. In fact, saying thank you, in general, is a huge part of worship and normally modeled well by church leaders. So when someone donates to a church, leaders spring into action to send thank you emails, texts, or special messages through the app. These messages help donors feel appreciated and gives them a stronger sense of ownership over the mission and vision of the church. And it encourages them to keep giving since their gift has been recognized and appreciated.

This new tool takes saying thank you to the next level by allowing churches to thank their donors based on the fund donated toward. Givers are no longer thanked just for their gift but can rest assured that their donation went to the place they intended. This new tool can be used to update, inform, and nurture donors to stay generous and also builds trust between the church and its donors.

Consolidated Giving

Non-cash giving

Every congregant is encouraged to be generous with their money. In fact, financial stewardship is one of the topics Jesus addresses the most in the New Testament. And ministries depend on over-and-above giving from members. But generosity isn’t just quantified by money—many congregants donate things like land, buildings, or vehicles to their churches. Before now, there wasn’t an easy and effective way for churches to record those gifts.

With non-cash giving within the Pushpay platform, churches can record gifts of all types and view these donations all in one place. This helps simplify record-keeping and ensures that all donations are properly accounted for.

Organizational Giving

As with non-cash giving, churches get all types of donations. It isn’t always a cash gift from an individual donor. Periodically, ministries receive donations from local businesses or other non-profit organizations to fund specific programs, missionaries, or to add to the general fund. This is another side of generosity that helps keep churches thriving and empowered to keep serving their communities.

On the admin side, these organizational gifts can be difficult to record or gets accounted for inconsistently. This new capability in the Pushpay platform gives churches the ability to recognize organizations, filter transactions, and generate giving statements, making Pushpay the single source of truth for all giving.

Innovation that serves your church

As your church pursues and serves your community, Pushpay exists to serve you. As a living software, we are constantly tapping into the needs and feedback of churches like yours to help you nurture and care for your donors, engage with new and current members, and drive deeper connections within your ministry. Our tools are here to support ministry in the digital age and the work your leaders do for the Kingdom each day.

If you have any questions about any of the new tools we’ve talked about, click here to connect with our Care Team. 

Don’t have Pushpay but would like to explore these tools at your ministry? Click the button below to talk to one of our experts today!