Client Overview
A multi-site church with five congregations and more than 2,000 regular givers reached out to ProvidusCRM. Member giving funds almost all of its ministries, building projects, and mission partners.
Its finance team had found that most tools for online giving for churches suit a single congregation well. However, their giving now ran across five congregations, several payment methods, and two tax relief schemes. A small team of staff and volunteer treasurers handled all of it.
So, they needed a Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud environment that held every gift, giver, and Gift Aid declaration in one record. Each congregation also needed to keep its weekly routine.
Their Challenge
Their giving ran through separate systems. Card gifts came through the ChurchSuite giving module, and regular gifts ran as GoCardless Direct Debits. Some long-standing members still gave by standing order, which only appeared on the bank statement.
Each congregation had its own contactless card readers. Cash and envelope collections were counted and recorded on spreadsheets at each site. As a result, the finance team matched gifts to givers and funds by hand before every month-end close.
Gift Aid added a second layer of work. Online declarations sat in ChurchSuite, while envelope givers completed paper declarations linked to their envelope numbers. The church also claimed top-ups under the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme (GASDS) on small cash and contactless gifts.
Because each church building qualified as a community building, every site needed its own record of collections, events, and attendance. However, the legacy setup could not track small donations by building or build HMRC claim schedules. So, every claim was assembled from several spreadsheets.
Plus, leadership had no combined view of regular giving across congregations. The annual generosity campaign asked members to start or increase a regular gift. Each Direct Debit change then had to be keyed in separately. Givers also could not see their giving history or update their Gift Aid status without contacting the church office.
Solution We Delivered
Our team implemented Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud as the central record for givers, gifts, and funds. Our data migration moved people records, giving history, envelope numbers, and Gift Aid declarations from ChurchSuite into Person Accounts and Gift Transactions. Active Direct Debits became Gift Commitments with matching Gift Commitment Schedules.
The church kept its existing GoCardless account. So, we linked each active mandate to its new Gift Commitment, and regular givers did not need to sign a new mandate. We then set up Gift Designations for the general fund, the building appeal, mission partners, and the hardship fund. ChurchSuite stayed in place for rotas and small groups, with contact changes syncing to Salesforce through its API.
We then connected FinDock to Stripe and GoCardless. Website gifts now reach the right giver and designation in Salesforce. Givers can use card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Direct Debit, or Pay by Bank. FinDock writes each payment to the Gift Transaction and Gift Commitment objects in Nonprofit Cloud's gift data model.
As a result, finance and fundraising report from the same figures. Its bank reconciliation also matches standing order payments on the church's bank statement to the givers who made them. Failed Direct Debit collections create a follow-up task for the finance team automatically. Plus, each congregation records its Sunday cash, envelope, and contactless totals through Gift Entry. Each building gets one Gift Batch per service.
After that, we built a Gift Aid and GASDS module using Apex and Lightning Web Components. The module validates declarations and groups eligible donations of £20 or less into aggregated lines. It then splits each claim into HMRC schedules of up to 1,000 lines. For GASDS, it tracks small donations against the £8,000 limit for each building. It also stores the event counts, attendance, and collection dates that the community building rules require.
Moreover, it stops a claim when small donations would exceed ten times the Gift Aid donations claimed in the same tax year. Before the switch, our consultants ran the first claim through both the old spreadsheets and the new module. They then compared the totals line by line.
We then launched an Experience Cloud giving portal. Members can now view their giving, update their Gift Aid declaration, change their regular gift amount, and download an annual giving statement. Flow automation handles thank-you emails and records generosity campaign upgrades against each Gift Commitment.
The Impact
- Unified Giving Record: We brought card, Direct Debit, Pay by Bank, standing order, contactless, cash, and envelope gifts from 5 congregations into one Nonprofit Cloud record, cutting month-end reconciliation time by 70%.
- Higher Tax Recovery: We automated Gift Aid and GASDS claims for every church building, increasing the value of tax reclaimed by 24%.
- Lower Processing Costs: We introduced Pay by Bank for one-off online gifts, reducing card processing fees on one-off giving by 30%.
- Regular Giving Growth: We gave members self-service control of their regular gifts through the giving portal, contributing to an 18% increase in regular giving after the annual generosity campaign.
