Online giving

eric,

Thats an interesting topic for discussion. I have been wrestling with online signup for church events (retreats, seminars, classes at other churches, events, etc.) and part of that is how to get money into the hands of the individuals in charge of setting the event up. In order to set something like this up, I would think that you need to have SSL certificates and someone to handle how the individual pays online, sort of like how that Yahoo works with businesses. The businesses have accounts on Yahoo space advertising their wares and use the services of the Yahoo credit card processing to collect the money. Of course, Yahoo charges a fee for this service but maintain a fairly uniform interface and security mechanism for ordering. It looks like you are ordering through the business but you have a wrapper over the Yahoo credit card processing. In a church environment you would also have to allow for check processing as well. Take that one step further and you need to have the credit card/check processing folk send information about who paid and how much to the accountant/bookkeeper of the church. The event coordinator would also need to have some idea of who paid as well.

Remember, you will get a small percentage less of what a person gives than what you as the church will recieve. If that is okay with you (or charge a fee for using credit/check) then go for it. Our church is thinking about letting people send their tithes/offerings in the mail or as an auto draft from their checking account rather than placing it into the offering plate on Sunday. I live around Washington, D.C. and things are always wierder here.

In your scenario, online giving would work somewhat the same way. You will also want to have the ability to designate portions of the offering/giving to different categories (general fund, a specific call for help, missions conference, a specific missionary that the church supports, etc.). The list could get quite involved. A drop down selection list populated by a MySQL query would limit which categories a person could select (makes the accountant and the elder in charge of finances happy). Don't forget the interface for the accountant to be able to add categories to the database. You probably should offer a pledge making capability as well. Most building programs rely on pledges from donors - you could also write a script to let an individual (who is logged into the site) see how he/she is tracking between their offerings and their pledge.

Just some thoughts.

Geek Herder

If you want to start simple, I'd just put a PayPal donate button on a page. That has no cost to you and lets you see if it is going to even be used or not. I guess it depends on how advanced you want to go but I know I'd start simple instead of investing a lot of time and/or budget.

To me, it's also a question of the purpose of your site. Is it designed for current members or prospective members? If it's for the general public then do you want to hit them up for donations before they've even been to your church? So I would think that online giving has its place inside a part of your site that is usually only going to be accessed by members. I guess with access control you can hide it from non-logged in users.

Hope those rambling thoughts help!
Andrew