Church embraces new technology and raises over £5k with new Give A Little Champion App

The church has been using Give A Little since 2020 and always keeps an eye on new developments. Long standing member of the church and volunteer, Tony Charles, was keen to try out the new Give A Little Champion App as soon as he found out about it. 

This year’s Open Gardens event celebrated the church's 850th anniversary and donations were in aid of the church and the school. The new app was ideal for the event as they wanted to deploy nine smartphones at the event including a number of iPhones, to collect donations using Tap to Pay technology.

Tony explains:

“We took donations for car parking, entry to the gardens and refreshments and we wanted to track the donations taken at each of these locations. To do this, we set up a supporter group in our Give A Little account, which then triggered an email invite to the nine local supporters who were helping at the event, to download the Give A Little Champion App. We also created separate campaigns for each location, which helped us track and analyse donations after the event through Give A Little reports. It was a real time saver for us as when we have used card readers in the past, we have had to set them up one by one in-person with each of our supporters. Whereas this time, all of our supporters were able to easily set up the Give A Little Champion App themselves with just a simple email from us explaining the set up steps.”

“All of our supporters were very happy with the Give A Little Champion App and everyone from the head teacher of the school to the daughter of All Saint’s vicar and her fiancé, found it easy to use - it worked perfectly.”

“As each of the items whether it was entry to the gardens, burgers, Pimms or beer from our vicar’s husband’s microbrewery had fixed suggested donation amounts, we chose to display multiples of those amounts to make donating even easier. The ‘other’ amount option was useful for anyone who wanted to donate more on the day too.”

On how donors reacted to donating via the new app, Tony adds:

“People had absolutely no problem at all with donating using the Give A Little Champion App - they were very impressed with how quick it was to donate.”

And on how All Saints Datchworth PCC plans to use the Give A Little Champion App in future, Tony has a few ideas:

“Now we’ve discovered the Give A Little Champion App, we will look at using it in the church to support taking donations, especially after larger services like weddings and funerals. We could also have somebody outside to receive donations when people are standing around talking after services.”

Summing up the church’s experience of using the Give A Little Champion App, Tony said:

“The end result was that ‘it just worked’! And we were very happy with how much we raised. The donations are extremely important to both the school and the church, which will use the funds to go towards its target of raising £60k for a much needed internal redecoration and damp proofing.”