NO EASTER BASKET
Apps are replacing church collections
Anewtechnology has arisen at Easter Sunday service, rendering the collection plate at City Grace Church nearly empty this morning and church treasurer Cathy Lee couldn’t be happier about it.
The coffers at City Grace, located on East 2nd Street in the Bowery, will now be filling up virtually, as its mainly under-35 congregation logs on to Brooklyn-based FaithStreet’s platform on their smartphones.
To Lee, 27, using FaithStreet is the natural extension of a life lived on a pocket-sized screen with apps for Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
“It makes [giving] easier, and if something is easier, someone is more likely to do it,” Lee said. “That has been true for me.”
Launched four years ago, FaithStreet now has searchable listings for nearly 270,000 houses of worship nationwide on its free online directory, including over 2,200 in the five boroughs, or nearly half of New York City’s churches. FaithStreet, which plans to triple its fundraising platform client base this year to well over 1,000, is competing in a crowded field.
Aquick scan of church Web sites listed in its local directory illustrates the dizzying array of options that local churches are using to solicit donations online, including NYCharities.org, PushPay, Venmo and Network for Good, as well as FaithStreet. Another fast-growing competitor is Tithe.ly, which has more than 4,000 churches using active weekly giving through its platform.
Virtual-collection-plate platforms take a small cut, typically around 3 percent, of donations.
It’s a low-overhead business with a feel-good mission. By automating giving, churches can boost donations as much as 30 percent simply by avoid- ing seasonal dips and missed contributions when parishioners are sick or traveling.
A new Dunham+Company/ Campbell Rinker study shows that in 2017 nearly 75 percent of US churches offered an online giving option, up from just 42 percent in 2015.
Americans gave $122.9 billion to religious institutions in 2016, according to the latest data from Giving USA.
These virtual-collection-plate companies face the unique challenge of maintaining the spiritual element of church giving as it moves online.
To that end, FaithStreet is de-emphasizing the “quick and easy” aspect of its platform, and working to help clients tell the stories of how the money raised benefited their communities.
“I would say the next [evolution] is less hardware-oriented and more experience-oriented,” FaithStreet co-founder Glenn Ericksen said.
In Colonial times, churches received public funding; passing the plate became common at the end of the 19th century, which brought peer pressure to the weekly tithing experience.
Now, at a time of declining church attendance and rising smartphone usage — particularly for financial transactions — religious institutions are adapting to the love affair between technology and money.
In fact, according to BankRate surveys, 40 percent of consumers carry less than $20 in cash on a daily basis, but more than 60 percent of smartphone users have at least one financial app.
In the past two years, nearly 60 percent of Tithe.ly’s clients used their mobile phones to give to their houses of worship, donating every day of the week, and at all times of day. Mobile payments overall in the US soared 72 percent, to $187.8 billion, in 2017, accord- ing to Juniper Research.
“The main benefit [of FaithStreet] is the automated giving feature ... which is helpful for churches — you don’t have a cash-flow issue,” said City Grace Church’s lead pastor, Benjamin Spalink.
But while a better angel beckons in the form of technology that easily allows parishioners to fund everything from firewood for widows to heat their homes in winter, to Thanksgiving dinners for struggling families (as FaithStreet says its customers have done), devils may lurk in the data.
Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and a string of high-profile payment-card data breaches in recent years have raised awareness of risks.
Officials at FaithStreet and Tithe.ly say they maintain strict protocols to thwart attempted breaches, and don’t sell user data.
To foster growth, FaithStreet has added a new feature called “campaigns” for specific causes, which Lee expects her church will use when raising funds for an annual trip to Haiti.
Tithe.ly plans to roll out a payment app for transactions made in church coffee shops or bookstores.
Tithe.ly Chief Executive Officer Dean Sweetman, a former pastor at an Atlanta-based megachurch, expects the majority of religious donations to be made online by 2023.
If that happens, City Grace’s Lee, for one, won’t mind.
“I think it’s kind of cool not to pass a plate,” she said. “It’s more discreet.”