The Most Wonderful Time (and Technology) of the Year

There is something truly magical about the Christmas and Advent season. It’s a time of hope, gratitude, generosity, reflection, and gatherings that are rooted in long-standing traditions. One of my favorite holiday traditions growing up was going to the Christmas Eve candlelight service with my family at the Church on the Hill in McMinnville, Oregon. While I’m not living in McMinnville anymore, it’s a tradition I cherish and carry forward with my own family. 

When I think about the significance of Christmas for the Church, I am humbled by how much trust our customers put in our team at Pushpay— and our technology—to help make this season meaningful for their community. Whether leveraging our Giving, ChMS, Mobile Apps, or Resi livestream solutions, we are overwhelmingly thankful to have the opportunity to support our customers and be a part of the great work they are doing around the world to build community, connection, and belonging.

Reflecting on the past year, I also can’t help but be incredibly proud and thankful for our team at Pushpay. Like many organizations this year, we faced some unforeseen pressures in a few areas of our business that have required us to be agile and creative in finding a solution forward. Yet our team is resilient and continues to innovate, provide excellent customer care, and is passionate about delivering cutting-edge technology to our more than 15,000 customers. 

A Year of Innovation

2022 was a year for the history books as many churches reimagined what their weekly services, ministry programs, and gathering routines would look like in a post-pandemic world. All online? Back to in-person? Hybrid? While churches grappled with these questions, our team was busy building in anticipation of the next wave of needs for your church and community. 

We celebrated many memorable moments and milestones as we diligently worked to deliver digital solutions to help churches increase engagement and reach their community, both online and in-person. In fact, we developed and rolled more than 40 product updates, enhancements, and new features to our customers this year, which is pretty incredible. Here are some of my favorite advances from 2022: 

Top new features in 2022

• Sacraments

This was a massive year for our Catholic customers leveraging ParishStaq! It’s no secret that we’ve been working hard to build out a great solution specific to Catholic churches, who have traditionally been underserved in terms of innovative technology. Among many other features, this year we launched the ability to view and track the seven Sacraments in our ChMS and LEAD App.

• App analytics

We developed a new dashboard that surfaces holistic trends on how community members are interacting with app content. It delivers actionable insights on how to better leverage mobile engagement to improve communication plans. In fact, church leaders recently indicated that mobile church applications are one of the most strategically important technology tools for the future of their church.

• Resi Livestream Integration

As we continue to bring our Pushpay and Resi products more closely together, I am unbelievably excited about the future potential this brings for our customers. We’re just getting started, but this year we rolled out a livestream integration, which enables churches using Resi Media livestreaming technology to easily add their Resi livestream and video library to their Pushpay mobile application for a seamless viewing experience. In addition, we launched a new media player that allows any item with the Resi draggable to be usable while video is playing. This is JUST the beginning of what we’re working on with our Resi team, and we can’t wait to share more in 2023. 

• Multilingual Translation

We are continuing to improve accessibility within our technology. One of the ways we delivered on that goal this year is by launching multilingual translation capabilities in both our ParishStaq and ChurchStaq suites. Pushpay’s new Spanish translation capabilities allow customers to easily toggle between English and Spanish within the giving platform, ChMS, and LEAD App, creating a more authentic and personal user experience within each product. And there’s more on the way: We are already in production to expand multilingual options to Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean dialects in the near future.

• QR Codes

COVID-19 certainly led to a resurgence in the use of QR codes, and our team jumped on the opportunity to empower people to be generous to their communities. We rolled out personalized QR codes to help provide an effortless way to give, download your church app, and engage with content. In fact, Giving Tuesday gifts to the Church via a QR code increased by 72% this year compared to the Tuesday prior, which is incredible. No more keywords or weblinks—just scan, click, and go.

We also launched a new Customer Portal. The all-in-one help center went live in early summer and delivers a convenient place to submit and manage requests, centralized help articles for our Giving, Apps, ChMS, ChurchStaq, and ParishStaq products, and a personalized user experience. 

If you feel like you’ve missed any of the features we rolled out this year, be sure to check out our product release page for a rolling list of recent product updates. Spoiler alert: 2023 is sure to be an exciting year as well! We’re already developing a host of great new features that we can’t wait to unveil in the coming months. 

Together We Build Community

To top the list of my favorite things we launched in 2022, check out our Together We campaign. What started as an opportunity to share and participate in a few local ministry programs alongside our customers quickly turned into an incredible tribute and reflection of the amazing work and programs our customers are doing around the world to provide hope and support for their communities. Our customers are a continual source of inspiration and motivation for all that we do here at Pushpay, and it’s been absolutely humbling to see how our technology is helping spread generosity, and bring people together this year. 

Our team has been inspired by the amazing stories from churches like Irving Bible Church, First Baptist Church in Garland, United City Church, Faithbridge Church and so many more.

The Future is Bright

We know this has been an intense season—and honestly, an intense few years—for the Church and our world. Yet the Church has been a harbor of hope for so many people, and you continue to serve with a spirit of kindness, gratitude, and thankfulness. It’s important for us all to remember that—while you and your team are building community with members and parishioners—we also have community in each other. So to all of us that are serving community through faith, let’s join together, arm in arm, with the intent to do good this holiday season and beyond.