Addo – Online Giving for Churches
addo.io
addo.io
I think the tagline "Grow your church community and increase giving" doesn't feel quite right. Specifically, "increase giving" sounds a little bit ... greedy, maybe? Every church I've been in recognizes that money is useful and necessary, but there's always that fear that people will feel like they have to give in order to be a Good Christian.
I'm not really sure how to improve the tagline, but perhaps you could focus on what money enables. The pain-point isn't that churches want more money, it's that they want to be able do more, help more, serve more.
Or something of the sort. People respond to vision, not need.
After reading it more, its awkward to put money and church in the same phrase, especially for churches.
I have attended churches that would disagree with that sentiment. :)
Can you tell us what the ADDO name means?
Curious what your involvement is with churches?
I think that's an interesting idea. The first thing that jumps out at me is that it better be very simple to use, and there should be a way to integrate it well with the church website, regardless of what system they use to run their website. But, I'm sure you've thought of that already. I don't think this would work out well for my church since we're pretty small at this point (about a hundred attendees most weeks) and not particularly tech-literate, but I'll keep an eye on this.
Awhile back I built a tool for my church to accept donations online. I later learned that 85% of donations in churches are given offline, and most churches don't interact with their members (or future members) online effectively. Enter Addo.
Key v0.1 features:
1. Accept donations via Dwolla, where transaction fee is $0.25. Way less than other payment processors.
2. Super simple "dashboard" showing donations in intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.)
3. Members can check their giving history, and update account info.
I'm currently fleshing it out for other churches to use. The landing page is pretty bare, but I hope to have more info up by end of week.
Here are some of the things I've learned:
Building the technology is the easy part. Stripe/Balanced (and all the other payments APIs) have made it easy to do a payment startup.
Customer acquisition and sales is the hard part.
1) Decisions are made by committee and for normal sized churches (< 500 attendance) the decision maker is not on staff. Therefore repeatable, cost-effective customer acquisition is really, really hard. Only a few channels are available.
2) The buyers are generally not business thinkers. I've tested different sales pitches, asking "would you rather have a service grow your top line by 10% OR cut costs by 15%?" Most say "cut costs" which is actually a net loss. Meaning: sales is consultative and educational and you have to sell it to over and over to every person on the committee.
3) Churches have a tough time justifying $50/mo for a SaaS service. The margins are too thin to make a lot of money in transaction rev. e.g. I processed $30k last month and made ~$300. You need a ton of volume for the math to make sense.
There are churches like Newspring (hi Joshua!) that are run differently and understand the values of technology. Most of the 300,000 evangelical churches in the US are not like that.
I have a friend who is a rabbi of a small but extremely cool, open orthodox synagogue on the Lower East Side (he's also a former web developer) He's done crowd funding before for the synagogue, since the building is historically important. Due to the fact that the congregation is open to whomever showing up, compared to other orthodox synagogues on the LES, he has an extremely tech literate crowd.
It might be a good match if it works for not-churches.
Its definitely something to consider after I ship. :)
Not sure if my congregation is ready to go "online giving", but the organization I belong to may be interested. Is this only suitable for church congregations, or would a church organization (state level) be able to use it?
There's a great infographic that breaks down whether online giving is right for your church. Check it out: http://i.imgur.com/WLysi7d.png
I'm going to update the landing page with more info here shortly...
Is it cool if I send this to some of my non-techie friends/family? One of your comments says that you haven't really shipped yet, so I'm not sure what your target audience is at this point.
edit: for what it's worth I also think chad_oliver and blankenship nailed it with their comments/suggestions.
about the edit: agreed.
1. Consider adding more information to your landing page. It's just a little too sparse at the moment.
2. Online giving can be a sticky subject, so I would suggest adding some scripture and exegesis to your landing page that can help people be at ease with it.
- I like the idea of scripture. It'll probably be something I do with a more fleshed out landing page.