The first concern of our churches during the Coronavirus Pandemic was: How do we connect with people now that we can’t worship in person? In the first two weeks, most of our churches quickly adopted Facebook Live or YouTube if they didn’t have anything before. Many of them greatly beefed up their online offering. It was truly remarkable to see how churches stepped up to the challenge of how to get the message out to the people.
The next concern: How do we allow people to financially support the church when we can’t worship in person? Some of our churches had electronic giving, but many did not. I was able to guide churches through setting up electronic giving through Vanco, but Facebook Donate seemed like a good solution too. I’d see Spirit of Faith in Woonsocket do this, but I had no experience.
Below you can watch the video on how to set your church up with Facebook to receive donations. Facebook covers 100% of any fees. Some drawbacks are that you can’t do recurring giving and Facebook is pretty rigorous in vetting charities so you need to have your paperwork in order.
Check out the video below:
Useful Links
- Woonsocket Spirit of Faith’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LutheranMethodistChurch
- Signup Page for Facebook Donate: https://socialgood.fb.com/charitable-giving/
- Post on Proving Church is 501c3: http://jctaccounting.com/2019/11/28/proving-your-church-is-a-501c3/
- Get UMC Group Ruling: http://umgroupruling.org/
- Finding Church’s Legal Name in South Dakota: https://sosenterprise.sd.gov/BusinessServices/Business/FilingSearch.aspx
- Finding Church’s Legal Name in North Dakota: https://firststop.sos.nd.gov/search/business
- Vanco for more robust electronic giving: https://www.vancopayments.com/egiving/umc
- Holy HaHa: https://www.holyhaha.com/ (You can find our recordings on iTunes)
We track giving for our members to be able to give them a Giving Statement at the end of the year for tax purposes. Would we know who gave what amount so that we could record that information for our members?
Information that I received from Woonsocket Spirit of Faith Church: We can see a report by person and the amount they give. The other positive is we get 100% of the donation as they do not keep any percent back.
Thanks for the update, Jodi. The administrator can see…which is often the pastor. I suppose you could setup the person who tracks donor records as an admin…or whatever role gives them that access.