Online Donations for Churches

When talking about church web site design, the topic sometimes turns to the matter of online donations for the church. What are online donations and how can they be processed? An online donation is a donation that is made online to the church in question. This is done by a simple matter of having several different donation processing facilities. You can accept credit cards, or other online payment processors such as Pay Pal or other donation processor companies. Let’s talk about how you would use these services and utilize them on your site.

Using credit cards is an easy way to be able to give a donation. This usually entails that the church have a merchant account with a credit card processor like MasterCard, Visa or Discover. You will have to sign up for a merchant account through these credit card companies, which usually entails a fee for service, but you will have the means to process the payment on site through a credit card company. This is one way to go. There are several other ways to be able to process payment for online donations and the next topic is using PayPal.

PayPal is the best known of all the online payment systems. You can receive funds via credit card, debit card or by PayPal account holders. Here is how it works. You will sign up for a PayPal account and receive a merchant number for your church. You will then put a button on your site that will directly link to PayPal. Then if anyone wants to make a donation to your church, they will simply click on the PayPal button and will be taken to PayPal’s site. There, they will be able to make a donation to your church using either credit card or PayPal account.

These payments will be processed immediately and you will receive email notification via your PayPal email id that a payment has been made to your account. These funds can be transferred into the church’s bank account and usually takes about three days to process from your PayPal account to your bank account. Now Click N By is a system that specializes in micro or very small payments. These services will suit for those selling numbers of items at a very low price.

Now churches can also be helped by signing up for firstgiving.com or justgive.com. This is for non profits in the USA to use. You will simply sign up for the service and your church will be listed in donate online section. They will collect the donations then send them to the church. This is another way to not only keep tabs on online donations, but will also make it much easier for those that are donating online to get the funds to the church. Each one of these ways is a good way to make an online donation and if you are using a web building service, then they will be able to add this to your site.