“Give A Little makes my job easier as Treasurer!”
St Mary’s Church in Redbourn has a very engaged congregation with over 300 members and regularly runs a range of events to engage with the local community. Treasurer, Michael Wood, was keen to enable the church to collect cashless donations and sourced a donation kiosk installed with the Give A Little App and software in October 2019.
August 31, 2022Michael explains: “We could see that people weren’t bringing cash as much, especially at services such as weddings, baptisms and funerals so it was important to us to give them a way to make card donations. People adapted to contactless very quickly and it really started to take off early in 2020.”
“Give A Little also gives us the ability to take donations on the web and that was particularly useful when the church had to close due to the pandemic. We believe that having the device in the church as well as online giving has helped us ensure that donations didn’t go down during Covid. It also helped us alleviate the problem of not having a collection plate, which we stopped due to Covid. Now that the church is open again, people often walk in and make a donation as the donation kiosk is so prominent and we’ve put it by the entrance.”
On what he likes about Give A Little, Michael added: “The donation kiosk has been really easy for our wardens to get to grips with and the campaign screens look really smart. It’s really quick and easy to set up campaigns on Give A Little and to have different campaigns for different purposes. This makes my job as treasurer easier as I can allocate funds to the right places. The separate Gift Aid reports are useful as they allow me to identify which of the campaigns the Gift Aid is allocated to because some of it is allocated to the church and some goes to other charities as we also collect for charitable giving.”
”We do a lot of events that bring people into the church and I like the fact that I can control the donation station remotely through Give A Little and change the campaign to suit the event, whether it’s a concert or an arts festival. Then I can see how much was raised for that specific campaign. We were also able to launch a Covid appeal quickly and easily using Give A Little’s web campaigns. The vicar sent an impassioned letter to our supporters with the campaign link and we had an amazing response. Give A Little has helped us raise that bit extra when we’ve needed it most and we are really pleased with the results.”