Activating your Donations Button
Many churches have set up an account with a digital giving platform to enable online donations to be received. Visitors to your church page can be directed to your giving platform, with our 'Donations Button'.
To activate this is simple:
When logged in to your church page, click on the pencil by your church name on the left-hand side:
Then scroll down to the bottom of the 'Edit your Homepage' and you will come to the Charity and Donations section. Tick the 'take online donations box' (this will switch on the donation button on your ACNY page) and then complete the boxes in the form.
FYI - The donations platform URL is the web address of your specific page, such as https://givealittle.co/campaigns/yourchurchpage - This needs to be copied into the URL box.
Once you have completed the form (as below) click save at the bottom of the page and your online donations will be activated. Please note that you must have completed the 'Page Content' field which contains your welcome and safeguarding message. If this field is left blank, when you click 'Save' none of your changes will be saved, including the donations button.
The Page content field must be completed to enable you to save any changes to your page:
Setting up a Donations Page
We also suggest that you create a Donations Page to promote online giving through A Church Near You.
- Add a new page to your Church Page and call it ‘Give Now’, ‘Donate here’ or similar
- Write some text explaining why you are looking for online donations. We have suggested some copy below to help you with this.
- Once you have set-up your donations page we have created a customisable video which you can create with our video generator. Once created you can download this file to your desktop which you can then share through your social media to help promote online giving for your parish.
- You can also add your donations video to YouTube or Vimeo, then embed it in your Donations page. learn how to embed video into a page here.
- Direct the reader to your online donations platform. The copy below concludes with the sentence, ‘Please visit our online donations page by clicking here’. This copy can be linked directly to your donations platform by hyperlinking the text. To learn how to do this please check out our help centre article on formatting text.
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If you want some advice about which online provider to use, please check out this article on the Parish Resources website. There is also best practice guidance on encouraging online giving there too.
Suggested copy for your donations page:
During this difficult time, the work of our church is reliant on people’s generosity, a generosity that is a hallmark of a lived-out faith and a testament to it.
We give to our church in a variety of ways, but with the past closure of all our buildings we have not been able to receive all the gifts that we usually would, so we really need your help now. If you are able to give more at this time, please visit our online donations page by clicking here.