Diocese of Hallam Sacred Heart opts for Give A Little’s DIY approach

Matt Davis, Diocese of Hallam, Sacred Heart, explains: 

“We started looking for a cashless fundraising solution properly during the Pandemic. The fact that we couldn’t collect any cash donations was a real driver as at the time, we didn’t have a way of taking card or online donations. While we had regular funds coming through via standing order, our one-off donations during mass tended to be primarily cash with Gift Aid forms filled out on paper and put into envelopes. Our congregation were in the habit of giving when they came to church so the pandemic forced us to think differently.”

“We had a good look around at the options available and discovered some really good ‘how to’ guides on the Church of England website that talked about how to accept card donations with case study examples, which included Give A Little. We investigated further by looking at the Give A Little website and it looked to be the perfect choice. The fees were low and Give A Little’s DIY option meant that you could test out cashless fundraising really affordably. We didn’t know what the appetite would be for cashless giving so finding a way of testing the water was really important to us.”

Matt started out with a DIY solution consisting of a second hand Lenovo tablet, a SumUp Air card reader and a floor standing tablet holder which he sourced from Ebay: 

“We started with Give A Little in February 2022 so we are in our third year with the platform. We started from scratch and velcro’d the card reader to the stand initially. This approach got us going. We set up a Give A Little online campaign at the same time. It was relatively slow going in the first year, although we still took £3,000 which we were really pleased with. We steadily started to get more usage and saw more take up when we were doing fundraising drives at Christmas and Easter and also for church maintenance. A lot of the donations were coming in online the first year but last year was a real turning point for contactless and we are now taking around £8,000 a year through Give A Little. We have seen both the younger and older generations starting to embrace contactless giving. We also switched from SumUp to Stripe, which we have found to be really reliable and we like the additional features which include the ability to take offline donations and recurring monthly contactless donations. Our plan is to move the rest of the congregation to card donations and use Give A Little for Gift Aid in 2025, as handling cash is both time consuming and risky. Moving to cashless giving will really save us a lot of time and will mean that we can use our resources elsewhere.”

Matt is also looking at trying out Give A Little Tap to Pay, which allows you to accept donations with a smartphone without the need for an additional card reader, for contactless giving during services:

“We have got a Google Pixel phone for Tap to Pay and plan to pass it around during mass. We will attach the phone to a giving basket with a bungie cord so that it still feels like you’re passing the basket around. We are also going to try printing out postcards with QR codes on to see how the congregation responds to those.

The ability to take offline donations is also a feature that Matt is making the most off:

“We discovered you can collect offline donations with Give A Little and Stripe inadvertently as we hadn’t realised that the router had stopped working for three weeks when payments weren’t coming through! When we realised, we were relieved to know the donations were stored and that we could sync them by reconnecting to the router. We are planning on making use of this feature at events as we now know we can take our donation stand to locations where there isn’t any connectivity. We are also trying out the recurring monthly contactless donations too and have already got a few coming in through the machine.”

On what Matt particularly likes at Give A Little after three years of using the platform, Matt summed up:

“We really like that Give A Little is so flexible. It’s great that we can set as many campaigns as we want and display them in a list so the donor can choose which fund to donate to. We can also use the devices and equipment that we want to and create nicely designed campaigns so they reflect our brand. Being able to test things affordably so we’re confident it will work is also really useful. I particularly like Give A Little’s ethos as you are very open about your costs and how things work. It doesn’t feel like you’re a big, corporate machine which is taking money from charities - this is really important to us as we need to get as much of the donation as possible so doing that efficiently is key.”