25 Years—But Really, Just 4

Their church has a quarter-century of vibrant history serving the San Diego community. A few years ago, however, leadership decided to pivot the name of their ministry to something that better spoke to the core of their mission.

“‘Heart Revolution’ has always been a part of our mission statement,” said David Ennis, who’s served as Financial Director for the past four years. “So it was always in the DNA, but it was never in the name of the church.”

As fate would have it, they made that switch—along with transitioning pastors—the week COVID struck. That one-two-three punch to their ministry was felt immediately. “Looking back at reports,” said David, “literally half of our donors walked out of our church that day.”

Building Back Stronger

“To be honest… [our focus] was just making it through,” David said of those early days. “There wasn’t a lot of outreach. [We were] trying to rebuild, and figure out how we keep this church afloat and not close our doors. Because we’re not serving the community if we close our doors.”

As they had for nearly a decade, Heart Revolution took advantage of Pushpay’s technology solutions to keep their head above water, and describe the online giving tools as their “backbone for receiving funds.”

“All the tools facilitate every donation that we receive as a church, but also provide ways to make it personal and measurable,” said David.

Beyond simply offering a channel to accept funds, the analytics they saw through the platform have informed and shaped their strategy for engaging and retaining their now-thriving community. For instance, on the tail end of the pandemic, when they realized that the average age of their growing membership was between twenty-five and thirty-five, they recognized the need to offer child care services to these parents.

What’s more, they heavily rely on staying connected to this younger generation all seven days of the week. “ Our app, in a lot of ways, is the pulse of the church. You could get connected to a lifegroup. You could watch this past Sunday’s message. You have the message notes. You have the giving tab. You have all the different events on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night.”

Local and Global Impact

Once again serving as the strong beating heart of their south San Diego faith community, Heart Revolution is making a monumental impact for everyone around them.

They share thousands of pounds of donated food each Thanksgiving, to a line of cars that stretches nearly a mile long around the block. During back-to-school season, they provide hundreds of free backpacks and haircuts to kids before they return to the classroom. They work closely with one of San Diego’s largest homeless NPOs, going so far as to walk those in need to shelter facilities.

“It’s no longer, ‘Come to Heart Revolution Church,’” David said. “Heart Revolution Church is going to the community.”

But their reach isn’t restricted to city limits. Not by a long shot.

“A way that we support local initiatives, and even global initiatives, is by adding tabs,” David said, speaking to the Pushpay platform’s ability to direct gifts toward specific causes. “We opened up a Ukraine missions tab to give funds to a pastor we had connections with over there. When the fires were really bad in Hawaii, we had someone in our church who has family there. We opened up a tab on Pushpay, the ‘Hawaii Missions Initiative,’ and we were able to send her out to help tons of people in that area.”

“We don’t feel like it’s taking away from our [regular] tithes and offerings,” David added. “We’ve actually found that when you have these specific avenues for people to give, to tie their heart to the needs of the community and to the globe, that actually brings more into the church, and our tithes and offerings haven’t gone down when we did those things.”

A Change in Perspective

Every church faced hurdles during the pandemic as they adjusted to a new way of making an impact through ministry.  For Carmel Church in San Diego, the struggles and fears of COVID weighed even heavier.

“During COVID, our Lead Pastor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,” said Nic Schneider, Operations Pastor.  “We circled the wagons. We shut everything down.”

Fortunately—and after “praying their guts out”—their lead pastor came through happy and healthy on the other side. “He ended up being healed. He’s fully recovered. Even the doctor said, ‘You’re the best cancer patient I’ve ever treated. Whatever you’re doing, we need to tell other people to do it.’

“It’s pretty cool that we got through that as a church,” continues Nic. “But one of the things that remained really strong through COVID and through his cancer battle was giving. It would not have stayed strong if it wasn’t digital through Pushpay.”

Charting a Course Ahead

Carmel took a necessary moment to breathe after such a massive trial. Nic recalled, ”Our pastor wisely said, ‘We’ve been through a lot. Let’s take some time.’”

But they never stopped thinking about the future. “Our pastors are always asking, what are growing churches doing? What’s on the cutting edge? What are you excited about? And they were asking the young people.”

Even with that progressive mindset, they never stopped relying on Pushpay Giving to facilitate and elevate donations. “​​I don’t mean to flatter Pushpay… but if it wasn’t the best system, I don’t think we’d be using them still, because we do look at other [giving solutions] every year.”

The “Move Forward” Program

Of course, they weren’t the only ones hurting after the pandemic—their San Diego community had struggled, too.

“Our church has been in schools, doing campus clubs, getting kids saved and things like that for twenty years,” Nic said, “but it’s always been a fight. The kids would have to say [to their administrators], ‘Hey, don’t shut our club down!’”

But COVID changed things, especially for young people. “Principals actually met with our church and said, ‘Please, can you come to our campus? Can you come help? Because our counselors are overwhelmed and kids are really struggling.’

“And so we took that message to our church and said, ‘Hey, we want to raise half a million dollars.’”

Spoiler alert on that bold request: They raised the money, and have used that outpouring of generosity to accomplish wonders. In middle and high schools stretching from Mira Mesa to Rancho Bernardo, Carmel Church’s “Move Forward” program continues to send campus missionaries and makes an undeniable impact: They reach an average of 300 young people per week, and now parents and volunteers also work with Carmel to make the program a continuing success. They even provide lunch for every student at their youth clubs, while they share the gospel and make disciples.

“About 125 kids have transitioned into coming to our church since we started, and they’re bringing their families. And we’ve done that through Pushpay.”

It’s interesting to look at growth through the lens of churches who serve a small, tight-knit community. And it’s doubly interesting when that church has led their local faith community for nearly 140 years.

“[The original area] used to be a junction point for a railroad in Missouri, then it became a brand new city called Carl Junction in 1885,” said Kenan Klein, Worship and Student Minister at Connect Christian Church. “A group of 36 individuals… saw that there was no church and thought, we need to put a church there to ‘connect people to Jesus.’”

Their church—named in honor of that “connect” line above, which was discovered in the original founders’ 19th century paperwork—had grown to roughly two hundred active members by 2020. Connect Christian was filling up their building for two services every Sunday, and at the beginning of March that year, they decided to include a third service to meet the needs of the community.

“We shut down three weeks later,” Kenan said—as did the rest of the country, per COVID social distancing restrictions.

As with most other churches, serious conversations had to take place immediately, specifically with regard to technology’s role in maintaining engagement during the uncertain months ahead. And while Connect Christian succeeded in holding their community together, inefficiencies in the digital approach became obvious during the pandemic—particularly with online giving.

“[Our previous technology platform] used a third-party to take all their transactions, and because it was third-party and not in house, it would take two to three weeks to hit the books,” Kenan said. “During COVID, that was terrible. There are some weeks where we have money coming, but we really need to spend money now that we don’t have, because it’s in this nebulous transition period.”

There were reliability concerns as well. “Facebook went down in 2021 for twenty-four hours. All of our ministry was on Facebook. At that point we’re like, we need another option that we can control that is not another entity, but it’s ours and we can have access to it, so if Facebook goes down we can go live there.”

Knowing a change was needed, they began their due diligence and started researching other technology solutions, and Pushpay quickly became a front-runner. One of the most appealing factors was how Pushpay processes all transactions in-house, which means gifts can be delivered in a couple days, as opposed to a couple weeks.

There were other advantages as well. “I think we should always be faithful stewards of the churches [finances],” Kenan said, emphasizing how this is especially critical for smaller churches. “For me, the biggest concern was return on investment. How is this product going to pay for itself? Because if it doesn’t, we can’t use it.

“I just basically made a spreadsheet of [our previous platform’s tiered pricing] and Pushpay’s price breakdowns, and the tools we use.” It was clear that a tiered plan would soon become untenable for Connect Christian’s goals, whereas Pushpay’s all-in-one pricing wouldn’t change as their community grew.

And grow they have—after adopting Pushpay’s suite of tech solutions, their congregation doubled in size to 400 active members in just three years.

While Connect Christian’s still-growing congregation is a joy for their ministry, Kenan has also been delighted by Pushpay’s customer success team. “I love that we were a church of 200 at the time, and I got the same experience as [a megachurch]… I’m in Southwest Missouri, and I was flown out to one of Pushpay’s customer meetings, and I’m like the smallest church there, talking about some of the things we’re doing.

Summary

At First Orlando, a leap of faith into the digital age with Pushpay led to incredible growth and connection. Matthew Robinson, pastor of Ministries & Administration, shared how the church moved from a dated, homegrown system to the cutting-edge technology of Pushpay in 2017. He noted that the change was guided by a desire for simplicity and effectiveness, allowing the church to focus on what truly matters: its ministry and congregation.

Since implementing Pushpay, First Orlando has seen tangible improvements in key metrics such as kids’ attendance and giving—vital indicators of the church’s health and growth. The church has also doubled the number of households giving and increased recurring giving sixfold. Most of its contributions have shifted online, with about 70% now coming through digital channels.

But these metrics also show a deepened engagement and generosity within the church family, empowered in part by digital tools. With First Orlando’s now centralized ChMS, they didn’t have to worry about fragmented data or outdated systems. Leaders, staff, and volunteers all enjoy seamless collaboration and a newfound clarity and trust in their operations. This addition to their tech stack has helped First Orlando’s large church feel intimately connected for a more effective ministry.

Challenges

With a church management system built in the late 70s, Matthew recalled, “it was made with old computer punch cards and had been Frankenstein-ed over 30 or 40 years.” With decades of changes, First Orlando’s systems had gotten complicated and hard to navigate. Matthew continued, “We had developers on staff, and everything was custom for individual people. And then, over the years a person would leave, and things wouldn’t be maintained. There was just such a segmented, hidden, protected, You-Can’t-Touch-This nature of spreadsheets and different databases.” This not only made it difficult to keep track of data but also hindered collaboration and communication among staff.

The church’s outdated systems also posed a challenge when it came to engaging with their growing congregation. As more people attended services and events, managing attendance, donations, and other important information became increasingly overwhelming. The team at First Orlando knew they needed a change in order to effectively serve and connect with their congregation in the digital age.

Solutions

When Matthew and his team realized it was time to make a change, he shared that his primary focus was finding “a ministry partner who allowed us the ability to adjust and customize what we needed but not be responsible for any of the coding or management of the software.” The partners they chose were Pushpay and Church Community Builder. Matthew reflected, “I had used CCB in a church plant I had started back in the mid-2000s and was familiar with it. We went through a full search with everything but landed on that as the best solution for First Orlando.”

Then, the process of organizing their data began. He shared, “When we implemented the CHMS, it was really a mantra for us: if it doesn’t live here, it’s not true. So we had to just really go through a cleaning and renovation of all of our systems.” This was a necessary step to fully utilize Pushpay and CCB’s capabilities.

Along with the management tools from Church Community Builder, First Orlando also adopted digital giving from Pushpay. This simple new method made it easy for members to give online and set up recurring donations, leading to increased giving and more resources to give back to their Orlando community. As Matthew put it, “We talk about generosity at First Orlando as the good that we are able to do for Heaven here on Earth.” With Pushpay, the church empowered their congregation to be more generous and make a bigger impact in the world.

Results

First, Orlando’s use of Pushpay has allowed them to grow and thrive as a church. In 2022, the First Orlando team prayed and challenged their members for the largest one-week offering they’ve ever taken in the history of their church. Their goal? To give it all away to ministry partners throughout the Orlando community. The congregation answered the call and raised over a million dollars at the end of October. Matthew shared, “Most of our people gave on their phone through Pushpay and then we distributed those funds back to our community through 30 other nonprofits that we partnered with throughout Central Florida who were helping with things from homelessness to food scarcity to sex trafficking rescue.” He continued, “We repeated that even bigger and better in October of 2023 and we’re going to do the same, Lord willing, in October 2024.” And with every year that’s passed, they’ve seen growth in that generosity. Matthew shared, “We have grown from 2,000 to 4,000 members, and from about 4,000 households giving to double that in our time using Pushpay. Online giving went from about 20% to about 70% of our contributions. And our recurring giving has increased sixfold over that period in terms of the number of households that are giving.”

One of the factors that Matthew credits to the church’s powerful growth and generosity is its technology. “We had this technology that enabled us to connect to our people, help them take this step and be generous. It helps us feel really small because of what we’ve implemented… there is a really exciting spiritual movement happening and we’re able to have valid reliable data points to show that change.” With Pushpay, First Orlando has seen tangible improvements in key metrics and a deeper connection and engagement with their congregation.

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65% of all donations are given through Pushpay

Summary

The Grove Church was founded in 1932 and is a multi-site church that is based on “Loving God, Connecting with Each Other, and Serving All.” They provide services to communities in Marysville and Snohomish, Washington but most recently have been fortunate enough to welcome communities and families around the nation through their online services, due to the statewide COVID-19 health mandates.

A diverse church made up of young families, a strong youth group, and healthy seniors, The Grove serves about 1,300 people any given weekend and acknowledges that while their community might have different day-to-day lives, they are bonded together through a common belief.

Problem

In early March 2020, due to the growing number of COVID-19 positive individuals in Washington state, gatherings of more than 10 people were prohibited to reduce the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, this resulted in The Grove no longer being able to physically serve the 1,300 people across both campuses.

As the leadership team racked their brains on how they could still connect with their congregation without meeting in the building, Jon Rich, The Grove’s Business and Administration Pastor, threw out the idea of having a drive-in church. He got the idea from remembering how Robert Schuller first started his ministry in the 1950s. They met at a drive-in theater and he preached on top of the snack shack on Sunday mornings. Rich thought, “Well why can’t we do that?”

Using the FM transmitter that some people use for Christmas light shows, the team set up everything they needed on the roof of their church, and the idea took off. The Grove was able to serve their community in their parking lot, as their congregation sat listening safely in their cars. From worship, to the sermon, and prayer—there was still a strong sense of community as people sat behind their windshields for Sunday service.

However, only weeks later, Washington Governor, Jay Inslee, issued the Stay Home, Stay Healthy order on March 23, 2020, pushing The Grove to move all and any services online. But would online services and giving translate to all 1,300 of their congregation?

Pushpay

Roughly a year-and-a-half ago, before today’s push for online services and giving, The Grove inherited a small church in Redmond, Washington, formerly known as Venture Church, which became an additional campus for them. With the additional campus, they inherited Pushpay. As the two church campuses became more integrated, one of Rich’s top priorities was to get both campuses under the Pushpay umbrella.

Prior to the COVID-19 epidemic, when The Grove first migrated to Pushpay services, 40% of their giving came from the Text-to-Give feature.

Most recently, Pushpay and Church Community Builder have teamed up to provide an integrated Donor Development Platform for customers. Pushpay’s tools now allow users like The Grove to see segments of givers in their church for a comprehensive view of their donor’s health. While the Church Community Builder integration can take the list of donors and add them in Process Queues to customize the donor follow-up and nurture process.

Result

Today, 65% of The Grove’s giving is from the Pushpay platform. The first big instance of how much Pushpay services have helped them through the COVID-19 epidemic was when they started doing the drive-in church and communicated that Text-To-Give was the most sanitary and simplest way to give.

Through the Pushpay integration, they’ve also been able to provide a live stream to four services on Sunday mornings, as well as Youth Group and Life Group meetings; they’ve learned how to communicate remotely; and they’ve leveraged the use of social media by scheduling pre-recorded watch parties to keep-up the sense of community and communication amongst their congregation.

Since the push to digitally connect with their congregation, The Grove has seen about 300-400 people per service join their livestream sermons. And a few more than usual, thanks to a viral video and news coverage of the drive-in services they provided earlier in March.

For The Grove, the current times navigating the current situation is a walk of faith. And with the help of Pushpay and Community Church Builder, it’s about trying to stay connected with the church, caring for people, delivering a message of hope, and trying not to make the administrative side of things too crazy.

2X increase in digital giving in first 6 months

Summary

St. Isidore is a contemporary Catholic community in the Archdiocese of Detroit and is exploding in numbers and engagement. It’s one of the largest parishes in the archdiocese with over 3,000 families and 9,000 members. The average in-person Mass attendance is 1,400 to 1,500 each weekend, with another 300 to 400 people joining them online. 

A major initiative in the archdiocese is to move parishes from maintaining the status quo to a focus on mission, where the Church is serving Christ and helping people develop a relationship with Him—something that St. Isidore is using technology to help fulfill.. 

Reaching people in new and innovative ways

St. Isidore delivers content in five ways: bulletin, website, social media, on-site screen, and through Pushpay’s church app. Matt Kush, creative director at St. Isidore, understands that every parishioner wants to be reached in a different way, and because of that, he added a custom church app as an additional platform to reach people who want to engage with the parish through their phones. 

“Part of our mission is to reach others in new and innovative ways and connect with our parishioners,” he said. “The ultimate goal of any church is to stay connected outside of the one hour that we have with them on Sunday. So with technology you can meet people where they are. You can meet them on their screens, and that’s where Pushpay has helped.” 

The St. Isidore app is consistently updated with spiritual content, video recordings, invitations to sign up for events, and the latest parish news. Having the ability to analyze app analytics has helped him curate content that resonates, and is encouraging for Matt as the parish’s content creator. The giving button, also within the app, is making an impact on generosity. 

“You’re in one app, one ecosystem, and when you open the app you’re met with beautiful rich content that you can scroll through. You don’t have to leave the app,” he said. “When you have to bounce around between websites and apps there’s a certain amount of trust. To have that confidence to stay within the app helps because they see that content from their parish and then immediately act on that by supporting their church.”

Increased giving over five years

Prior to onboarding with Pushpay, St. Isidore used a free tool that they described as “clunky” and “archaic.” 

“One of our challenges is making people understand that free is not better, or cheap is not always the best solution. It’s still widely used by many churches in our area which blows my mind because Pushpay is such a better solution,” said Chris Kozlowski, parish business manager. 

The parish leadership team believes in removing hurdles for engagement. The free tool they were using made all aspects of engagement difficult, including software adoption and making changes within the tool.  

“Pushpay is really completely donor managed,” said Kozlowski. “People can come in and out of it whenever they need to, and it’s mobile-centric so they can use their phone. We field very few calls to our office, which is an important thing to me. The fact that the parishioners can figure it out really quickly or go to Pushpay customer service. The main reason for getting on Pushpay is that it’s hurdle-free and it can easily integrate into website design. We’re really pleased.”

The parish kicked off 2018 with a soft rollout to staff and leadership who were immediately jazzed with the new tool, and then it was finally introduced to the parish community. Staff and volunteers teamed up to help parishioners sign up for Pushpay and answer questions after every Mass. They also gave away free t-shirts to help get the word out, and videos of parishioners describing how easy it was to give through Pushpay. 

“From that point forward we started running and then plateaued a little—and then Covid happened. That first couple weeks, we started pitching it again and boom integration went way up. I think for many weeks in 2020 and 2021 we had as many gifts online as we did in-person envelopes and checks,” said Kozlowski. “Before Pushpay we were around less than $100,000 a year. After the first year with Pushpay it jumped up to $120,000 a year, then up to $200,000 then $360,000 and this last year was over half million dollars received through Pushpay. The system does a lot of the work.” 

An exciting part of using Pushpay is when people who have never given to the archdiocese before give to St. Isidore. Kozlowski credits their weekly streaming services and how Pushpay easily integrates into what they’re doing and how easy it is for people to jump on. 

“Like any household, once you know that your retirement fund is where you want it and your kids’ college education is where you want it, then you can start dreaming about vacations. Same thing for a parish community,” Kozlowski explains. “Once we know that our fiscal house is in order, then we can start imagining more about what we could do for Christ. What can we do in the name of Christ? We don’t have to worry about the day to day. For me that’s a huge part of it. Because it’s a lot more fun to think about how we can engage more people, than how we can get enough money just to keep the lights on. That’s not a fun discussion. It’s a really fun discussion to talk about how we can further engage in the Archdiocese of Detroit and move from maintenance to mission. I think we’re ahead of the game now, so it’s an absolute blessing for our community.”

Results

After implementing Pushpay, St. Isidore rapidly increased giving and engagement, and five years in, are still seeing steady growth. Ready to start your journey with a platform that supports mission-focused parishes? Talk To An Expert.

98% of digital giving to campaign

Summary

When Ricky Ortiz arrived in New York City to plant Meta Church in 2017, he came with big plans. Ortiz dreams of 50 healthy churches spread out throughout the city, engaging the community with the gospel.

In December of 2017, Meta Church launched a giving campaign designed to fund the young church’s efforts to advance the gospel locally by securing a venue where the church could meet weekly and expand the team. They also had a goal to invest in equipment and technology to produce, edit, and distribute sermons online through social media, email, and the Meta Church app. And lastly, they sought to advance the gospel globally by supporting church plant efforts around the world.

Ortiz wanted to set an ambitious goal, so he set the church’s aim at $15,000—a tall ask for a young, New York City church plant.

Problem

Reaching the $15,000 goal wouldn’t just be tough for Meta Church. It would require new methods and strategies to reach it. Ortiz knew he had to keep potential donors engaged on a consistent basis if he wanted to have any chance. He also needed to provide a simple, culturally appropriate way to give.

Pushpay

Meta Church partnered with Pushpay right from the church’s start. Ortiz had been familiar with Pushpay from his time on staff of NewSpring Church. NewSpring would frequently recommend Pushpay to other churches in its network. Mobile giving fit the New York City lifestyle. Ortiz wanted to eliminate as many stumbling blocks to generosity as he could. Though he chose Pushpay because of its ability to provide a simple way for people to give digitally, Ortiz saw the new mobile app as a great “bonus.”

When Ortiz made plans for the holiday giving campaign, he leaned on the church’s mobile app and Pushpay’s digital giving solution to help. The church directed people to give through text messages and the church’s app.

“Pushpay gave us an easy way for us to onramp people to the campaign,” Ortiz says.

Meta Church also used mobile notifications to keep its community up to date on the church’s progress toward the goal.

Result

Meta Church didn’t just meet its $15,000 goal. They surpassed it.

“It blew our minds,” Ortiz says. “We thought we were nuts having a goal of $15,000. And for us to raise $22,700, that was amazing.”

And, Ortiz added, digital giving through Pushpay helped make that happen. All but $300 of the $22,700 raised through the campaign came in through digital means. (That’s more than 98 percent of the total.) People from seven different countries gave to the campaign.

Thanks to the donations, Meta Church tackled all three goals of their fundraising campaign. They secured a meeting location. They purchased a camera and streaming equipment. Since January, the church’s online videos have been viewed more than 9,000 times. They’ve also supported two church plants (in Kigali, Rwanda, and Battambang, Cambodia) with funding that provided each church with six months of meeting location space.

10% increase in overall giving

Summary

LibertyLive.Church is a four-campus Southern Baptist church in Virginia with a passion for changing lives, communities, and the world for Jesus Christ. In addition to their four brick and mortar locations, they also have a vibrant online community they treat as a fifth location. In 2016, LibertyLive.Church began experiencing some issues with their giving solution, and that’s when they began to take a serious look at Pushpay.

Problem

By 2016, LibertyLive.Church was already on their second online giving solution, and they were experiencing some trouble with that platform. That’s when they started looking for a new solution— something with an exceptional end-user experience. While they had some crucial considerations on the integrations front, their primary desire was to find a solution their community was going to love. They knew if the experience wasn’t clean, simple, and easy-to-use, their community wouldn’t adopt it.

Pushpay

When you talk to Justin Greene from LibertyLive.Church, he’ll tell you this was their third platform move, but it was by far the easiest. Part of what made that experience easy was Pushpay’s five-step implementation system. As with any move involving a large number of people, there are going to be stragglers, but the entire process took them about eight to nine months to get every last person moved over. Pushpay’s templates made the process painless and fast.

Result

The results LibertyLive.Church experienced speak for themselves. This year alone, giving is up 10%, and they’ve gone from having 45% of their community on recurring giving to 60%, which is an incredible jump. The recurring givers have allowed the church to have a more predictable and stable budget. The church has just come out of the summer for the first time ever without being negatively impacted by the summer slump. In fact, they ended the summer with a surplus!

One of the Pushpay features LibertyLive.Church took advantage of is “default to recurring,” which simply prompts new users to set up a recurring gift right away. Our customers have seen up to three times the number of recurring givers after launching this feature, resulting in over 4% increases in monthly giving.

In addition to the recurring giving feature, LibertyLive.Church launched a generosity campaign with Auxano, which gave them a good foundation for ways to talk about giving with their community. The combination of this campaign with a simple and easy-to-use giving solution proved to be a great combo that has sparked a new spirit of generosity in their community.