Name: The New Reality of Church Giving: 2026 Report Insights for Every Church Leader
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T19:30:07.032Z
Duration: 47 min 20 s
Description: The New Reality of Church Giving: 2026 Report Insights for Every Church Leader

Transcript for "The New Reality of Church Giving: 2026 Report Insights for Every Church Leader": Hello, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. We're so glad you're here. People are slowly coming in. While we're waiting, why don't you guys hop in the chat? Looks like some of y'all know the drill. You're telling us your name and where you're tuning in from. That means you've been to at least one of our webinars because I ask that every time. But I think it would be fun to also know your favorite Easter candy because Easter's coming soon. So put in your favorite Easter candy. I might have done that one the last webinar, but we're gonna do it again because it was fun. What is yours, Anna? I'm trying to think. I feel like it's changed a lot since I was actually searching for Easter eggs. But I've always liked the Nugent candy. What's it called? Nugent? candy? Yeah. Nugent. candy? Yeah. I've always loved that. And That's beans. I just love jelly beans. yeah. Okay. So the Starburst jelly beans are where it's at, I think, in? the jelly bean world. Yeah. They're so good. Okay. But I on the last webinar, I think I said Reese's eggs, are really high up there, but also those little Cadbury eggs. Yes. Those are the ones. They're so good. So good. And they you can only get them, like, during Easter, so I think those might be the winner for me. I love it. Yes. The mini robin's eggs. Oh, the robin eggs are, also. they're pretty good. They're pretty good, but I think the those Cadbury are the best. Spearmint leaves. I've never heard of those. Do you. know what that is? you having real candy or are you eating spearmint leaves? I asked them. We have a garden and sometimes we do that, but that's crazy. Yes, Vivian. Anything chocolate. I love it. Alright. You know, my dad had the unpopular opinion of black licorice jelly beans. Those were the only ones he liked. And so every Easter, he would have a little basket of black licorice Easter jelly beans, and. I my favorite. understood that. That's so funny. Oh my goodness. They're jelly candies like orange jellies. I know what those I know what those are. Those are really good. Okay. Well, we've got people still filing in. This is awesome. In the meantime, we would love to, hear from you. If you just came in, you're telling us who you are, what your name is, and where you're tuning in from, and your favorite Easter candy. Also, hopefully you found the chat by now. Most of you have. But if you're looking at the screen to the right, there is a section where you can engage with us. So you will have the chat tab that should be open automatically. Mark, yes, Cadbury eggs. Those are the way. And then there's also a tab for q and a. We're also going to be doing polls throughout this demonstration, throughout this webinar, so that tab will appear when we launch a poll. We've got four polls for you guys today to make sure you're paying attention and you're staying engaged with us, so we will let you know when those pop up. You'll also get a notification on the screen. So we can go ahead and get started since it's two minutes after the hour, but we are so so glad to have so many of you joining us today. I will say that we had record breaking registration for this webinar which is very exciting. But what that tells me, I have a hunch, that in general, right, we, like, wanna understand where we stand against the status quo. So for example, there's, like, all of these quizzes that have been going around social media for years, like, which Disney princess are you? You know, these types of things where we just kinda wanna understand more about us. And in this case, we're trying to understand where our churches or our parishes kinda fall against the rest of the the church world. So we're glad you're here. Hopefully, this is super insightful. I'm actually gonna ask a quick question. You should have, hopefully, by now found the emojis and the GIFs, although we haven't seen any come through. On the chat, you'll notice you have those options here, is super fun. We would love to see more of those from you. But go ahead and drop in an emoji if you have already downloaded this report today. We would love to kinda know if this is the first time you guys are seeing these insights or if you've already seen some of them. Alright. Awesome. Okay. So several of you. A lot of you guys have. That's so good to hear. Yeah. We've got some ads going around on social media. Okay. Yes. The Cadbury egg. So good. And then also, we've got this on our website. We've emailed you hopefully to let you know that this report is available. So anyway, very glad you're here, very glad you've already had some eyes on this. If not, and you're like, I've not seen this report. I don't even know what this webinar is about. Great. You will have a link to download the report sent to you tomorrow. If you want it sooner than that, head to ministrybrands.com, and you'll see it right there at the top. There is a banner that will allow you to download that report. So without further ado, we're gonna go ahead and get started. Oh, one more thing. Yes. This webinar is being recorded. Yes. This webinar is being recorded. I'm gonna say it again. This webinar is being recorded, and you're gonna get it tomorrow. So that's always something that's asked in the chat. We're happy to answer it later on if someone joins later. But, yes, you will get this tomorrow. So there's that, and I think that's it in the way of housekeeping stuff. So jumping right in, quick introductions. My name is Jess Moore. I oversee all of our client communications here at Ministry Brands. And so if you're getting our newsletter or if you're getting an email about some changes to your account or exciting new updates to your account. Those are likely coming from my team. I also host these webinars and have done so for a very long time at this point. I've been hosting webinars at Ministry Brands for five years, which is crazy. So very glad that you're joining us today. And with me is my new friend Anna, and I'm gonna let her introduce herself. Thanks, Jess. So hi, everyone. My name is Anna Coragio, and I'm a digital analyst at the Parable Group. If you recognize my face, it's because I did this webinar last year as well. And so I had the chance to be the primary analyst and author on both the church and parish annual giving reports, and I truly loved getting to work on this project again. I'm really excited to be here today and walk through some of the fun things that we discovered through this process. We're so glad you're here, Anna. Yeah, this entire webinar, I'm actually going to jump to our next slide. This entire webinar is obviously based on these two reports. Right? We did a church report, which last year we kind of consolidated information from both churches and parishes into one report. By popular demand, we've split those out. So that's super helpful for you guys to be able to kind of dive even further into the insights and the data to make sure that this, you know, fully represents your denomination. But Anna, like she said, it was the author and the analyst for these, meaning she was responsible for taking all of the survey data and converting it into these reports. These reports are also visually beautiful. There's a lot of graphs that you can see so that you can better understand this, and so that's all Anna's work. And this entire webinar is just reviewing that information. So she will be doing most of the speaking because she's intimately familiar with all of the metrics and the data from these reports. So very, very excited that she's here with us. We also have my friend Kristen in the backstage here of our webinar, and she is going to be helping facilitate your questions. There is only one Kristen back there, so please be patient. We will do our best to answer questions that you might have. I am happy to help with, like, product questions. I know our product our giving software very, very well. And Anna will do her best in between slides to try to answer report questions as they come in. Kristen is really there to help us know which questions need to be answered most immediately or if there's questions being duplicated, so on and so forth. So she'll do her best to answer. If not, just be patient with us. We will get to your questions as soon as we can. Worst case, if we get to the end of the webinar and we have not answered your question, we get all of that in our reporting, and I promise you we will get back to you via email if we need to. So anything that you wanted to share here on this particular slide, Anna? I don't think so. Just making sure everyone's familiar that if they do want to ask questions to specifically use the Q and A panel because it'll be easier for us to see those answers or see those questions so we can answer. them. Oh, yeah. Good good call out. Yeah. There's that q and a tab is best case scenario to help both Kristen and us. One more thing too, and I didn't I didn't say this for some reason, but Parable Group is separate from Ministry Brands. Right? So this is one of our partners. We partner with Parable Group, but what they do is analytics and reporting. That this is this is Anna's bread and butter. This is what she does, not necessarily for Ministry Brands, but they've been a wonderful partner with us now for a couple of years. And so that's why I'll be answering the Ministry of Brands product questions while Anna will be reporting or answering the reporting questions. Okay. So quick agenda, and this is basically reflecting the report exactly. We're just gonna give you highlights from each chapter. So looking back, making giving easy, the language of generosity, who is giving and when, church size breakdown, and then AI and technology. Then throughout those chapters, those sections, we'll kind of sprinkle in a little bit of product sampling for you just so you can see, oh, okay. We're talking about, say, recurring giving. Let let we're gonna show you how that functionality works on the back end. We are not going to give you step by step instructions to turn that on. If you do need assistance in that way, please let us know in the q and a or the chat, and we'll make sure to answer that separately. But we want you to see kind of what those features look like for donors. Right? At the end of the day, that's the most important thing. Is this a great experience for your congregation, your givers, your parishioners? We want them to have the best experience. Okay. So let's dive in. Anna, take it away, girl. Okay, great. So we're going to start with just a generic look back on 2025 and what the overall data shows. And the big picture is that overall giving is up. So for churches, we're seeing a really strong positive trend with over half reported increasing giving. For parishes, the picture looks a little bit different, 38% reported increases, but many others are seeing more stability or are still evaluating their giving trends. But overall, this points to continued generosity across both churches and parishes with opportunities to better understand and engage donors in different ways. And this is one of those one of the first kind of product highlights that we have. So within the giving platform, whether you have Perishoft giving or one of the Ministry Brands giving platforms, This is a dashboard that you will see probably right when you log in. If you don't see this for any reason, it may have something to do with your permissions. We wanna make sure that you connect with your primary administrator, if this is something you need to see for your day in and out job. But this will show you can kinda filter this. You can see in the top right of the screenshot, you can filter this by time frame. And so this would be a really quick high level way to kinda see what your Giving has done over the last year. It just so happens that our demo account went up, which is wonderful. Hopefully, yours did as well, but this ours is a very generic straight line. Yours may look like hills and and valleys, and that's okay too. It's just it's good information to know and be aware of. So we suggest maybe you check on this quarterly just to get a pulse on what your giving looks like. Has anything changed? Have we stopped talking about giving every week and only switched to quarterly? This is just information. Right? All of these metrics are just information. And let me actually pause I meant to say this at the beginning. If you're here, it's because you care about the future of your church, and you understand that giving is an act of worship regardless of your denomination. And so as we're looking at this information, just keep that in the back of your mind and filter all this information through that. These are people who are acting in worship, for your church, for your parish, and they wanna support you, but they also just wanna be obedient in their stewardship to the Lord. And so we'll just kinda keep that in mind. Sometimes it gets real easy to just dig into the numbers, but we have to recognize that these are people. These are sacrifices being made. And so we know that here at Ministry Brands, and we wanna make sure that you know that we know that this is you know we're not taking this lightly. Sorry. That was a little bit of a segue, Anna. But, yes. So this is where you can see that in information in your giving platform. You should be able to see something similar to this in, hopefully, any giving platform that you have. If you cannot, we would love to show you a little bit more of Ministry Brands. We'll have a slide at the end where you can, scan a QR code and and talk with a generosity consultant, a giving consultant here at Ministry Brands to see if, Ministry Brands giving would be a good fit for your ministry. So, but, yeah, this is this is where you would find this information in your giving product. Okay. So as we continue to reflect on what we saw in 2025, the next question naturally is what does this actually mean in practice? And so one of the biggest takeaways is the importance of making giving easy. We're gonna jump on over to a poll. We wanna hear from you guys which digital giving methods does your church or parish offer. I can go ahead and open this poll. It should pop up on your screen, and we'll give you a minute or two to answer that and compare it to our results. yes. It'll be over where your chat and your q and a are. You should also see, like, a little blue notification box. So, hopefully, you find found it by now. Oh, yeah. Y'all found it. Votes are coming in. Website. A lot of people recurring giving. Yes. I love to see that. We do have lots of votes for digital wallets too. That's great. Okay. Looks like website and recurring are kind of in a race for first place. Exactly. Yep. That's so good. Yeah, this is very consistent with what we saw in the data, actually. We'll see in a second. But I think for churches, website giving was the top digital method. But for parishes, automatic recurring giving was the top digital option. So it's kind of interesting to see that play out in a live poll. Yeah. Awesome. Alright. Well, Anna, if you wanna move on to the next slide, I can close this out here in just a second. Okay. But this is helpful for us, guys. Thank you so much for taking time to engage with that. So looking towards the survey results, we saw, again, very similar results that we saw with the in house poll. Across both churches and parishes, in person giving remains the most widely used method by a significant margin. But at the same time, we're seeing strong adoption of digital options, which is where we see especially website giving and recurring or automatic giving kind of taking the lead there. And again, that's exactly what we saw with in house polls, so nothing too surprising. Mhmm. But what's especially encouraging is the range of giving methods that are currently being offered. Clear and accessible giving is not about convenience, but rather creating more space for people to participate in giving. So overall, this highlights an important takeaway: that donors are engaging in a variety of ways, and there's a real opportunity to meet them wherever they prefer to give. So I was happy to see with our poll that we have a wide variety of people offering all of these various different giving methods because that truly is the pathway to unlocking generosity. That's so true. I do wanna call this out just because this question is surprisingly being asked more than once, and it's a great question. We should have clarified this as well. So we are representing our the data, and in this webinar, we are addressing both churches and parishes. And that might feel confusing because a parish is a church. I I wanna distinguish that we did this data for Catholic churches, which would be our parishes. I know parishes is sometimes used for other denominations as well. But in in the case for, like, this webinar, we're talking specifically Catholic parishes versus Protestant churches. So hopefully that helps, and you may find yourself in a bucket where you're both, which is totally fine. You can download either report, and this information is, for the most part, similar. So hopefully it's helpful to both of you, just wanna make make that distinction. The churches is Protestant, generally speaking, and our parishes, in this case, is going to be Catholic specific. Okay. Great. Thanks, Jess. So building more on what we just looked at, we're gonna shift over and see that churches are offering a wide variety of ways for people to give. But which of these is the most important? Some directional trends around a few specific giving options stood out in the data. So in particular, survey churches that offer digital wallets, recurring giving, and livestream giving were nearly twice as likely to report an increase in giving compared to those that don't offer any of these giving options. So while offering a range of options is crucial, these three stand out as especially impactful to include, which I think is important to note because it can get a little bit overwhelming if you're like, hey. I'm only offering website giving and in person giving. It might not be easy to feel like, okay. Let me just do all of these different things. Start where the focus is, where the data is showing people are giving. And then moving on to the parish side, we see a similar theme but with slightly different mix of what's standing out. And so recurring giving for parish soft parishes continued to grow year over year. Digital wallet giving more than doubled, and surveyed parishes offering QR code giving were more likely to see growth in new donors. So taken together, this reinforces the same broader idea that making giving simple and accessible in ways that align with how people are already engaging can help to support continued growth. Okay. So within the ministry brands giving platforms, we have these options, the options that we specifically talked about. We have recurring giving. And what we're trying to highlight here I mean, obviously, have recurring giving. But what we're trying to highlight here is that you can set your giving forms to default to recurring. So when someone goes to your website or if they scan a QR code or if they access your giving from the mobile app, whatever the case might be, when they get to the form itself, you can set that to default to recurring. And what that does is, number one, make them aware that this is an option. And then two, it it helps them work through the process and say, oh, I can set this up automatically. How wonderful that is. And and the reason we would recommend that is because it's a lot easier for ministries to budget when many of their donors, if not most of their donors, are on recurring giving. It's a really, really powerful feature that we recommend congregation, but that you would default your forms to, just for the sake of awareness. Obviously, we have live streaming and QR code giving available as well. This is through an integration with our streaming platform, so I wanna be clear about that. But it is an option, that you can leverage. And if you want more information about that, let us know in the chat, and we will be make sure to answer that for you, or connect with you after. Or you can scan a QR code, not the one on this slide, but later in the presentation, and we'll connect with you about that as well. And then this last, image here is our our giving same giving form, but it's on a mobile app I'm sorry, on a mobile device, and it shows our digital wallet options. So we have I mean, also our card. I think ACH is on there too. It's kinda small on my screen. But, we do offer digital wallets. We've got PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Venmo at this time. So all of those options are available, through Ministry Brands Giving and Parishoft Giving. So many good questions, and I wanna answer them all. But, guys, we're I just have to answer your questions, most of your questions via email. This is a thing. We're getting so much engagement. But, anyway, I will try we'll we'll try to answer them as as quickly as we can. And, also, a lot of the questions I'm seeing would be answered in the reports themselves as well, and so that's just a common theme I'm kind of seeing. If you read the report, a lot of these questions will answer themselves, but we'll still try to answer as much as we can. Good call out. Okay. So moving on to conversation. We've seen how accessibility can invite generosity, but another another key factor in sustaining it is actually conversation. And so as we know, talking about giving can feel pretty uncomfortable. In fact, one in five surveyed churches reported that they avoid talking directly about giving. What we're seeing is that how giving is communicated really matters. And so when giving is talked about clearly and consistently, it helps people better understand how and why to participate. So we'd love to hear from you again. I'm going to open up another poll asking how often does your church or parish talk about giving? And we would love to hear your results. So that's this one. I know it's very tempting to answer in the chat, but if you guys would engage with the poll, that would be helpful as well. So, again, as a reminder, if you found the chat, just look right next to the word chat, and then you should see poll, and that's where you would engage with that as well. Looks like lots of people are saying either regularly or occasionally. And again, if you need to find the poll, it should be right next to the chat tab, and there'll be a super basic questionnaire for you. Occasionally. This is this is interesting to me. This is a personal soapbox of mine. I think that churches should talk about giving. Absolutely. Yes. This is this, so our in house poll is doing a little bit better than the survey results, so that's pretty exciting to see. So if you're watching now, it seems like this this group is doing a good job at communicating more regularly about giving. We'll leave the poll open for a little bit, but I'm gonna go ahead and transition into the survey results. So starting with the Protestant side, we've broken this one down. We. wanted to look more closely at how often churches are talking about giving. So only a third of surveyed churches reported to talk regularly about giving. This. is a little bit inconsistent with what we're seeing in the poll. It looks like it's still not a majority, but it looks like more people in our in house poll are reporting that their church or parish talks about giving regularly, so that's great to hear. Mhmm. But what we did find is that churches who talk about giving regularly were 1.7 times more likely to have seen growth in new donors than those that rarely discuss giving. This highlights the idea that consistency is crucial, and how you frame that message is also equally important. Mhmm. So when we look about how giving is framed, hopefully, you can read the graph on the right. Sorry if the text is a little bit small. But a few things kind of stood out to me. The most common approaches seem to center around purpose, connecting giving to mission and impact, as well as transparency and clarity around how giving is used. The language of generosity also matters because when people understand the purpose behind giving, they're much more likely to engage with it. Mhmm. And then moving on to the parish side, we see a very similar pattern. Parishes that talk regularly about giving were three times as likely to have seen an increase in giving than those that rarely talk about it. So, again, frequency appears to play a pretty meaningful role. And when we look about how parishes approach these conversations, one of the most common patterns is integrating giving into a routine. There's also a smaller portion communicating more directly, but overall, is woven into existing systems. And so together, this kind of reinforces the same idea that the way giving is approached and how consistently it shows up can really make a difference. Yeah. I'm gonna take one second to just get on my little soapbox here for a minute. Just as a reminder, back to what we kinda said at the beginning of this, this is an act of worship, and giving is biblical, right, across both denominations. And so, really, your responsibility as a church leader and if you're attending this webinar, there's a chance you are the finance board or an office manager. I don't I don't assume that everybody here is in a position to be doing the actual talking about giving on a weekly basis. But if are in a position of leadership, just a gentle reminder, that this is a biblical commandment, and so it is perfectly acceptable to talk about giving on a more regular basis. It really just like Anna said, the entire idea is just how you frame it and how you approach it. There's a way to do it that's not yucky and not taboo. And we have so many wonderful resources if you are in need of a reminder of how to do that well. We've got lots of resources in the Healthy Church hub, and we'd be happy to pass those along to you if you are in need of a refresher. But please ask. It's really important because you could potentially be robbing your congregation or your parishioners of blessing that they would be receiving by walking in obedience in this area. So that's a pretty bold statement, but I fully believe that with my whole heart from my own experience with the Lord's generosity. So please know that it comes from a place of love and encouragement. Thanks, Jess. Alright. So we've been talking about how giving is communicated, but now I would love to get a sense of who that message is actually reaching. So another poll for you guys. We're gonna ask what age group represents the majority of your church or parish giving. I just went ahead and opened that up. So, again, if you go in the top right corner, at least that's where it is on my screen next to the chat, there should be a separate column for the poll. So go ahead and answer to the best of your ability. This is always so interesting to me too. That track? far, zero votes for 18 to 29. That's always pretty Sad understandable. but true. Yeah. Yeah. The reports ain't lying. Alright. I'm seeing that 60 to 74 seems to be the clear majority winner. Okay. We've got also quite a few who have 45 to 59 in that primary giving age group, a few for 75, a few who aren't sure. So, again, it's helpful to know who makes up the majority of giving in your church or parish because that very well might alter your strategies in how you approach giving and generosity in your church or parish. But it's also helpful to know how giving is changing across these various age groups. And so what we're seeing is that churches were more likely to report increased giving among congregate congregates over the age of 30 compared to younger adults. Again, this is something that isn't super crazy, not super surprising. But how can we actually reach and engage these younger donors? Growth and generosity among younger adults tends to show up more often in churches that offer digital giving options. So kind of circling back, more specifically, churches that provide digital wallet giving were nearly twice as likely to report increased generosity among those aged 18 to 29. Wow. So while older generations continue to be a strong foundation of giving, there's a clear opportunity to engage younger adults by meeting them in ways they're already comfortable giving. I mean, this for me personally I'm 24 years old I don't even carry a physical card or cash or anything around anymore because I'll just tap my phone wherever I go. And so if you want to unlock greater generosity in your church or parish, it's really important to meet people where they are and where they feel comfortable using different payment methods. I love this. Also, just wanna really quickly, well, let me see. What's the next? Oh, yeah. While we're here, digital wallets, we talked about it in the the last time we did a a product feature. But, in case you actually don't know what digital wallets are, to be clear, those are like Apple Pay and Google Pay and Venmo is kind of unique too. It's a different experience. It's very cool the way that it works. But if you are not super familiar with how those work, basically, people are they they have it's like it literally is like a virtual wallet where they already have payment methods saved in either Apple Pay or Google Pay are the easiest examples. Right? And so what they would do is if they get to the giving form and they say, oh, I wanna give with Google Pay. When they tap that button, they'll be prompted to log in to that already saved virtual wallet. It allows them to very quickly select a card. Why is that better? Because it's a lot easier to tap in potentially even saved login credentials versus an entire credit card number using your thumbs on your phone. Right? So that's why we suggest highly to I mean, obviously, Anna said it's a preference. It's a it's a clear preference among younger donors, but also it's just that much more convenient. And what we wanna do in providing a giving experience is that it it's easy. Right? We want to reduce that time between them saying, I support this mission. I wanna participate to the time that they actually make that gift. So, just a quick quick recap on what digital wallets are and why they're better and why they're generally preferred by young people besides the fact that they don't carry cash and check anymore. I don't either, and I'm not a young person. I'm like a person. Thanks, Jess. Okay. So moving on to SHIFT, let's look at how things change based on church or parish size. So for this report, we categorized church and parish size based on average weekly attendance and household count, small, medium, and large. You can see this graphic on the right side kind of shows how we decided to break those numbers up. When we analyze giving across different sizes, we see a pretty clear pattern emerge. Medium and large churches and parishes were more likely to have reported an increase in overall giving in 2025 than small churches were, according to our survey data. And so this kind of suggests that growth strategies will differ depending on church size, because what works for a large congregation with more donors and staff may look different than the optimal approach for a small church or parish with fewer resources. And then regardless of church or parish size, one thing we are seeing across the board is the growing role of technology and AI. And this was kind of a fun thing to dive into this year. It's something that was new on these reports this year. And for me, personally, it was super fun to look at that this data because it is so new in its emerging role in in the giving process. It's it's very early, but we wanna start by kinda getting a sense of where everyone here is actually at with their AI usage. And so I'm gonna open another poll asking, is your church or parish currently using any AI powered tools? So if you're actively using it on a regular basis, maybe you'll select that first answer. If you've started playing around with it but you haven't kind of integrated it into your routines or systems yet, then maybe you would choose the second option. But I'm sure many of you probably haven't even dipped your toes in this yet because, again, it is so early. I wanna see these results. I was trying to answer a question, but I wanna see. Oh, yeah. It looks like majority are not currently using, which is very consistent with what we saw in survey data. But. there are actually quite a lot of people who are actively using or exploring and testing, and so that. is great to see. Good job, guys. We're trying it out. Okay. So let's look at the survey data. We see a pretty similar pattern, but it looks like more of you in the the webinar right now are actually actively using or testing AI than our survey participants did. So that's great to see. I think embracing the way that embracing change is hard and but very important. And so it's beginning to emerge as a support tool for both churches and parishes, especially when it comes to communication and messaging. But, again, overall, most are still in early stages, either exploring, testing, or not yet using AI at all. And so this is very much an area that's still developing, but in my opinion, one that has growing potential to support churches and parishes and how they engage with their communities. We also wanted to understand how it's actually being used today and the impact it's having on those who are using it. And so looking at these two graphs, we can see that AI is primarily supporting communication among surveyed churches and commissions. Things like drafting messaging, creating donation appeals, and helping with follow-up are some of the most common use cases. But furthermore, according to survey data, churches that are using or testing AI are actually more likely to report growth in new donors. And so while it's still in early stages, it really does show potential as a practical tool to help make communication more consistent, clear, and easier to sustain. Alright. Moving on to unlocking greater generosity. So in order to unlock greater generosity, it's pretty important to first understand what might be creating friction in the giving experience. Mhmm. And what we can see here is that many churches and parishes report that their congregants face barriers when giving online. In fact, nearly nine in 10 churches reported that their congregants experienced some kind of barrier. The most common challenges center around familiarity with technology, preference for giving in person, and concerns around security. And so this points to an important takeaway, that generosity isn't just about willingness, but it's also shaped by how easy and comfortable the giving process feels. So rather than just identifying these challenges, we want to actually understand what it looks like when those challenges are addressed. So that brings us to ministry branch churches and parish off parishes. These barriers are real, but it's encouraging to see that when they're addressed, we start to see meaningful differences in giving. And so let's see how these ministry branch churches and parish shop parishes compare more broadly. What we're seeing is that these churches and parishes were more likely to report increased giving overall compared to other survey participants. And this is important in the context of what we just discussed because, again, when giving is accessible, it helps reduce some of those barriers and creates more opportunity for people to participate. It also has an association with new donor growth. So what we're seeing is, again, a similar pattern that ministry brands churches were more likely to report an increase in new donors compared to nonministry brands churches. On the parish side, it's even more of an impressive difference because parishes using parish self giving were 2.4 times more likely to report an increase in new donors compared to those using a different giving platform. So, again, this connects back to this same theme that we've seen throughout this whole report. Making the giving process clear and accessible is what's going to engage new donors and lower that barrier to entry. That's right. Guys, we're I'm frantically trying to answer your questions. These are wonderful, amazing questions, and I appreciate you guys engaging with us. I we're we're gonna get to them as as quickly as we can as I mentioned before, but, really, truly, this is overwhelming and wonderful. So, actually, multiple people have said, hey. We need a giving platformer. We need to be able to leverage some of these features. And so we wanted to make sure to have a way for you to connect with someone if you're interested in finding out a little bit more. So if you're not already part of the Ministry Brands family, let me just really quickly say, you know, we we do have two giving platforms available. One is more specific to our Protestant churches, and the other is more specific to our Catholic churches. There are some small differences there because ministry brands is literally a we're we all we do, our bread and butter is serving ministries. All of our products, that's all that we do. And so whether you are a Protestant church or a Catholic church, those giving platforms are tailored specifically to your needs as a ministry. So there are features within the Catholic platform that look different than they are in the Protestant platform because churches have different needs. For example, second collections. If you're a Protestant church, you may not know what that is, but Catholic churches do. So those options are slightly different. The platforms themselves are both really, really wonderful. I started working at Ministry Brands seven years ago with our giving platform, and it has grown. And it is so wonderful, and we love, love, love that we get to partner with churches to make kingdom impact. And so if you're interested in finding out a little bit more about a giving solution that is for you, you can scan this QR code. You will be taken to a landing page where we'll collect a little bit of information from you. If you are part of the Ministry Brands family and you're like, I saw something about livestream giving, also a great place to scan. In fact, if you want to just hear anything about any of our products here at Ministry Brands or connect with someone, just please scan that QR code, and we'd love to help you out. If you have questions that are specific to functionality, if you're like, I wanna understand how to turn on digital wallets, or I wanna understand how to we had a great question about reports. Like, how can I see within my reporting? Can I see specifically just recurring giving and what how that has grown? We don't have the bandwidth to oh, hi, Tammy. We don't have the bandwidth to answer all of those technical questions here within this webinar. So if you have, like, product questions and you want to better understand how something works, we do have, a very robust help center. I didn't include a QR code to that. I should have, but it's, help.ministrybrands.com, I think. Help I don't know. You can you can find the help center within your giving platform. So just log in there, whichever one you have, and you should be able to access that. There's also a chat feature there. You will be chatting with a live person. It'll it'll give you some prompts first like, here, does this article help? And if the article doesn't help, just say I wanna talk to support, and we'll get you in touch with someone, and they can answer your questions. But we wanna help you. We wanna help you use what you have well. And if you don't have something you love, we'd love to tell you a little bit more about our solutions as well. And then lastly, again, if you have not downloaded the report, there'll be a link to do that in your email tomorrow. So or you can go to ministrybrands.com right now, and there's a banner at the top of the screen where you can download that. You can also go to parishsoft. Kristen is at parishsoft dot com? I think it is. And you can download their report there for Catholic as well. So, I just rambled for a while, I think. But I think we're pretty much wrapping up. Let's see. What time is it? Yeah. We only have two minutes, so we won't be able to address your questions right now. I'm really sorry. We will have to just get to the rest of these questions via email. Pinky swear we will get to them as soon as we can. Lastly, we do have a survey. This is a survey about the webinar today. So, hopefully, you loved me and Anna's presentation. And we also ask you on there, like, what else do you wanna hear about? So if this is the first time you've been on a webinar, let us know what would be helpful for you to learn about in future webinars. It does not have to be giving related. It doesn't even have to be it really these webinars are intended to be, like, thought leadership, so just church related or parish related. Let us know if there's something you wanna talk about, and we can try to work in a webinar about it. And then let me think what else is on there. We do ask if you wanna connect with someone on our team, but the QR code's a better option for that. So you don't have to do that. Anyway, answer those questions. We will not see any of that data right now like we do with the polls. So be honest. We wanna hear from you, honest to goodness truth. And so did did you happen to launch that? I'm gonna launch that. just did. I just did. did. Look at you, Anna. You're the best. Okay. So then lastly, what's next? And we've already alluded to this multiple times. I think I've said this, like, six times, but you're gonna get the recording tomorrow. The the email comes exactly twenty four hours after the webinar started. So whatever time we started today in your time zone, that's when you'll get the email tomorrow. So you will get this recording if you'd like to pass it along to anyone else at your ministry. We'd love for you to do that. And then you'll have that link to download both reports. If you're interested and if you're like a a Protestant church, you know, I'm actually super interested to compare this data. Go ahead and download both. Knock yourself out. So and then that's pretty much it. So, Will, I see I see your your last. Yeah. Charles, it's not a poll. That's a survey, so it's gonna look a little bit different. But then, Will, yeah, you if you want that report, like, ASAP, head to our website. We can drop that in the chat. Kristen, if you're still on, if you would just drop in those two websites into the chat, that would be wonderful. And then otherwise, we're pretty much wrapped up, friends. So thank you so much for taking time to be here. We appreciate you, and we love supporting you. So let us know if there's anything else we can do, and we will try to get to your questions as soon as possible. Yeah. Thank you all. Thanks for being here, Anna. Couldn't have done it without you. course. Thanks so much. Yeah. And happy Easter, everybody. It's coming right up. So Kristen just dropped the links to our websites if you want to grab the report right now. Otherwise, you'll get that link tomorrow. So alright, friends. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.