How Parishes Are Leading The Charge Against Covid19

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How Parishes Are Leading The Charge Against Covid19

Churches and parishes have shown great efforts in helping their supporters collect strength during a time of such crisis. In a time when gatherings and masses weren’t a possibility physically, we saw a time of non-conventional online masses and live streams that brought together supporters in even greater spirits. Here are some examples of the efforts put by organizations in this time of a pandemic:

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Activities : Multiple online live streams to connect with their supporters. 

The parish has put great efforts in embracing technology during the coronavirus crisis. The parishioners hosted online live streams for their supporters to join in, pray and attend masses. They have set a great example on how parishes could help people strengthen their faith with the use of technology during such a dire situation.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Facebook
  •  Their masses have been conducted in multiple languages thus engaging with supporters in multiple ways and larger numbers.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel fb post

Switched to GiveCentral Text-to-Give and used Specific Keywords which makes mobile donations much more relatable. GiveCentral allows parishioners to use keywords which are event specific as well as can be customized as per their needs, while using Text-to-Give. This helps donors identify the event, ultimately making giving easy.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Easter Donation

This has helped their Mobile Donations grow three fold of the entire last year collections in the first four months of 2020 itself.

St Mary of Vernon

Activities: Dedicated communications using GiveCentral Emails and social media.

The parish used to witness an email read rate of about 10% of their registered emails with GiveCentral.

  • With dedicated communications during the time of the outbreak, more and more people started connecting with their emails and their reading rates shot up five times to about 50%. 
St Mary of Vernon Email
  • The parish shared useful information and guidelines with their supporters on social media, and conducted many live streams to interact with them.
St Mary of Vernon Facebook Post

With continuous and effective communication, supporters did start engaging with their mails much more. Moreover, by being on the top of their donor minds, when comparing received donations in March 2019 vs March 2020, the parish witnessed a tremendous increase by 160%

St Joseph and Francis Xavier

Activities : Extensive social media messaging for engagement and sharing useful information like ‘giving links’ in videos and posts.

St Joseph and Francis Xavier twitter post
  • They have engaged with the users and helped their followers with useful information by sharing links and profiles.
  • To gain support for the cause, they have embedded their giving page links in all their social media videos. It must be noted that their online presence has led to a great increase in their donations. 
St Joseph and Francis Xavier Youtube video

When comparing received donations in March 2019 vs March 2020, the parish witnessed an increase of 55%.

St Anne Barrington

Their website has been intuitively designed with all the right things in place for any visitor to understand and learn about their efforts. Moreover, to direct their supporters, they have placed their GiveCentral links through beautiful pop-ups where users can easily notice and visit the online donation page. With separate sections for parish news, updates and calendar, they have made it very easy for their supporters to keep in touch with what’s ongoing. Consequently, an increase of more than 20% when comparing received donations in March 2019 vs March 2020.

St Anne Barrington website
  • Their team promoted their service schedule on social media and reminded people to visit their website. They also focused on clear communication by letting their followers know where they can find links to join or contribute.  
St Anne Barrington tweet
St Anne Barrington Twitter Comment

Archdiocese of San Antonio

It must be easy for your supporters to be updated about your upcoming plans. With proper links to inform your supporters as well as a user-friendly website this becomes very much possible. The Archdiocese is a perfect example for that. Moreover, a personal video of Archbishop Gustavo addressing their supporters mentioning engagement and giving helped them engage with a lot of people. Implementing tools like Text-to-give has helped them make giving easy. 

Archdiocese Of Baltimore

Activities: 

Switching to GiveCentral’s express giving tool provided the Archdiocese of Baltimore the ability to offer online giving from multiple devices to their donors. Most legacy systems that facilitate online donations do not directly connect the giving habits of online givers with their membership records- an obstacle that is related to contribution management. GiveCentral provides their users with a unified dashboard that helps them create campaigns in under a minute, integrate multiple giving options with that campaign and also track their campaigns easily. 

The communication features allow location to create scheduled email reminders with smart tokens- a feature that enables one-click giving to donors. 

Let’s look at one such example of a personalized giving page that includes a link to donate, which is promoted on different communications platforms.

Archdiocese Of Baltimore Giving Page
  • Image a – Giving Page

The giving option is also highlights on the homepage of the Archdiocesan website, which reinforces how important parish giving is at this time

Archdiocese Of Baltimore Parish giving
Archdiocese Of Baltimore Press Release
  • Image c – Press release with Giving Link 
Archdiocese Of Baltimore Facebook Video
  • Image d – Adding the TTG number short code to their live stream and sharing it on all social media platforms 

Other initiatives 

Archdiocese Of Baltimore facebook

Keeping the communication lines open by adding a chat box on their website. Resultantly their donations have increased by 70%, when comparing received donations in March 2019 vs March 2020.

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