About 2 years ago a new idea and company was born. Marty Baker, the
Senior Pastor of Stevens Creek Community
Church in Augusta, GA, had the idea for a new way to donate money to the
church. A way to reach out to his congregation in the way that they lived day
to day. He realized that fewer and fewer individuals carried checkbooks or even
cash. So "dropping their donation into the offering plate" was not something
that many of the younger members could relate to. So Marty began to observe
what people carried and used in their daily lives, at the grocery store,
getting fast food, at the mall, etc. The answer was Debit Cards. Debit Cards
look like, smell like, and feel like Credit Cards but the money is withdrawn
directly from your bank account.
So Marty experimented with building what looks a little like Check-in Kiosks that
accept Debit Cards, with an attached pin-pad device. A member or visitor to the
church can walk up to the kiosk, select the Fund to which they want to donate,
enter an amount, swipe their Debit Card, enter their 4 digit pin code, and get
a tax deductible receipt. It's a little like a reverse ATM in your church. J A big benefit of using a pin debit is
that that it only costs pennies per transaction.
Marty took the idea to market and launched a for-profit
company under the name Secure Give
about 18 - 24 months ago. As of May 2008, Secure Give has about 60 churches as
clients, including organizations like the Pearl Harbor Memorial in Hawaii.
New Partnership
We became aware of Secure Give shortly after the company
launched but we were admittedly skeptical about its acceptance in the church. In
recent months we've seen a real increase in interest from our client base
concerning Giving Kiosks so we're excited to announce our new partnership with
Secure Give.
The integration is pretty straightforward. Secure Give is
programming against our Data Exchange API to extract / synchronize the list of
Individuals the church has stored within Fellowship One. The church member
walks up to the kiosk and is prompted to enter their 10 digit telephone number.
If their member record is found, then the member proceeds and donates money to
one or more funds.
On a periodic basis (nightly / weekly) Secure Give will pass
the contribution records back to Fellowship One. We will then programmatically
import that data into Fellowship One, matching it against the appropriate
member record. If a transaction being imported does not match a member record
within Fellowship One (the member is new) then that giving record will be
posted to the Fellowship One unmatched queue. The church will then manually
match the record to an existing member or create a new household just as they
would for any unmatched contribution.
Competitive Landscape
New competitors are cropping up in the giving kiosk area.
One of particular interest is Secure
Pointe. The idea and user interface is similar but their pricing and
delivery model is significantly different than Secure Give. We have provided
Secure Pointe all of the same information we gave Secure Give and expect their
integration to be complete soon as well.
Contact Information
For more information please contact either of the two
companies listed below. They will also be at our Dynamic Church Conference in
May.
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Secure Give
www.securegive.com
706-228-3210
info (at) securegive.com
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Secure Pointe
www.securepointe.com
Don Brock, dbrock (at) securepointe.com
Office: 336.993.4111 x. 305
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