People need help from each other to thrive. The less fortunate individuals hardly have anything to survive upon.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people have lost their jobs and have landed on the streets, begging and dying. Charities and donations are a real help during these hard times.
Many non-profit organizations and NGOs take the lead in these fronts, helping people.
Many people donate to their Churches to sustain their congregation, and often the Churches help people in need. Text-to-give campaigns can be of real help to the Churches because texting is the new normal now, and it’s very convenient.
What is a Text-to-Give Campaign for Churches?
Text-to-give campaigns are a comparatively new fundraising technique that uses modern technology like smartphones and the Internet to raise money for various humanitarian causes.
Donors just have to text the exact figure of donation they intend to give to the organization on the specified number or text the shortcode and fill up a form and give the money. The entire process can be carried out indoors, using a phone.
Text-to-give campaigns for Churches is exactly what the name suggests, members of the Church and other donors giving funds to a Church through texts.
Churches require donations for various purposes such as maintenance, tithe and even helping those in need.
Giving money via texts is extremely convenient and easy, because of which it’s gaining popularity among Churches and other organizations.
Using Donorbox as the platform for such text-to-give campaigns is the most ideal thing to do.
Donorbox makes giving very easy. It lets the members of the Church and other donor just message the Campaign ID to the phone number that has been provided, and they will receive a link to a donation form.
Upon submission of the form, the donation will be completed and donors will instantly receive a thank-you text. Thus, Donorbox ensures donating to Church is extremely simple for the supporters.
How to Set Up a Text-to-Give Campaign for a Church with Donorbox?
In this technologically advancing world and ever-growing cashless economy, Text-to-give campaign feels like embracing the future. Setting up one for Churches for collecting donations through Donorbox is extremely easy. These steps should be followed…
- Set up an account
Before everything else, the Church has to set up an account on Donorbox’s platform. Setting up an account is extremely easy and is very quick. Once the account has been set up, the church can then modify the campaign as and how it requires.
- Have a campaign target
Once the account has been set up on Donorbox, the work begins. In order to start the fundraising, the Church must have a clear idea of the goal of the campaign and can it be really attained through text-to-give alone or does it require other fundraising techniques.
Questions regarding the urgency of the campaign such as, how much money the Church actually needs for the success of the campaign, and is the goal actually realistic should be clarified within the board of the Church. It should be remembered that people will only give their money to a campaign if they feel it to be honest and transparent.
- Build the donation
After setting a clear goal for the campaign, the campaign has to be created using Donorbox. Logging on to the free Donorbox account, “Create Campaign” has to be clicked from the account dashboard.
Donorbox allows complete customization. Once all the information for the campaign has been uploaded, the Church will be able to customize the appearance of the form to be filled up for donation and the type of information that the form will collect from the donors.
Once the form has been set up to the liking of the Church, equipped with options like repeat donations, the Church then has to choose the payment processor like PayPal according to its liking. After all of these, the text-to-give part has to be integrated.
- Generate a text-to-give campaign
Once the donation has been built and the form has been set up on Donorbox, the text-to-give feature has to be enabled. From the Donorbox dashboard, click on the “Add-ons” and enable the text-to-give feature. There are two plans and the Church can choose from either one of them.
There is the basic plan of $19 per month or the short code plan of $50 per month. The short code plan comprises all the benefits of the basic plan and provides a shorter code 801801 which is simpler to remember and allows a customized keyword to specify the campaign.
It is as easy as making a few clicks to get started with Donorbox.
- Search for the campaign ID
After enabling, return to the main dashboard once again. The campaign ID which is unique to every campaign can be found under the campaign section. This ID is the unique code that the donors need to text to Donorbox’s text-to-give number (1-855-575-7888 or the shorter code number 801801) to initiate donating to the Church.
Donors need to text the accurate ID for the campaign to the text-to-give number to get started with the donation. Should they ever want to stop the donation, the can message “STOP” to the number. The short code plan requires the donors to send the keyword “GIVE” to initiate the donation and then the campaign ID.
- Promotion
Once everything has been set up, the campaign will need promotion. If people don’t know anything about the campaign, they will not donate. Text-to-give campaigns are gaining popularity because of its integration with social media. The Church send out mails or can post about its campaign on Facebook, or it can tweet about it. Apart from this, it can let the elderly know about the campaign through the Church newsletter.
- Ensuring recurring donations
Doorbox ensures recurring donations by the same donor with a few clicks. The members of the Church can give again and again by simply texting “YES”. Donorbox will verify if they want to repeat the same amount of donation, and they can text “CONFIRM” if the answer is yes.
Since Donorbox ensures that donors can donate quicker than before, they will be more inclined to give again. More the repeat in donations, more funds will come in.
Thus, Donorbox is a very powerful and effective platform for text-to-give campaigns. It’s easy to use and very simple to set up. It ensures the campaigns are as successful as possible.