Tithe.ly Erfahrungen

We had a web site we were building ourselves, but with Tithely we now have a better website that can be integrated into our app; a great app that can communicate with our members; a text number that can be used not only with 'text to give', but can be used as a digital visitor card, a book check-out, or to send information about an event or a ministry using keywords of my choice. Fundraising and online giving work great and are comparative with other online giving programs. We have also added child check-in to our church. Not only is it pretty easy to use (and has great help videos), but it uses a nice-looking design for all of its online uses.

There were some features we advertised to our members that are not being used by them. We have pushed those further back and focused on what is being offered and used instead. At times there is a miscommunication with our child check-in, but I believe that may be a local firewall issue and not a Tithely problem.

While easy to setup when a modification had to be made we came to an impass. Customer support to resolve a solution took three months and hours of communications all the while Tithe.ly continued to collect donors money and would not transfer it to the Church. We finally had to have Tithe.ly return donations and they came back through Facebook listings on credit cards, much to my surprise. Has facebook purchased tithe.ly or are they part or disclosing even more information on who belongs to what church, to a company that is already carrying too much personal data in our country? The return of funds from facebook was a second big red flag. The first was reading tithe.ly's privacy agreement when personal license and bank statement images were requested.

Thoroughly read thithe.ly's disclosures for you and your donors before you sign up.

I wonder how long this post will last

David/ 12/06/21

NO customer service, facebook is invloved with credit card transactions. and 3 months to return funds to donors.

Fairly simple to use. Even with lots of features, there are natural places to go and look for them. There are several extra features that I probably wouldn't have tried as a stand alone, but are really cool. We just implemented the credit card reader through Tithely Pay and it has been really helpful.

They are still building everything out so there are a few quirks. For instance, we have their larger church management system (Elvanto) which is where I have to go for things like group reporting and kids checkin. If I want to look at online giving or send messages, I've got to go through the tithely interface. If I want our church app, I go through the Tithely interface, but it sends me to another landing page for our app. None of this is a big deal because I know where everything is, but it might take you a few minutes to get familiar with everything.

Tithe.ly provided us with a solution for online giving that passed muster for the bankers in our congregation, which had been a stumbling block for other companies. The security provided, and the options for fund designation make it a fantastic product.

Occasionally, our members have had issues finding our institution on Tithe.ly's list. When this happens, we usually direct them to our web page, where we have our direct link.

Easy to set up and learn as admin. Takes a lot of work off my plate and totally worth the small fee for what it does. One of my favorite features is sending giving statements for the year by email with a click of a button. Boom, done.

Viewing transactions doesn't always work on mobile. Doesn't load fully, so I have to refresh a couple times.

I believe there's parts of tithe.ly that beneficial for small organizations. My ministry is small and growing, but I still find tithe.ly as a whole to be very useful. They have a lot of different guides that always accessible. However, my favorite part of tithe.ly is their 'sites'. My website and giving is powered by tithe.ly and I enjoy it very much. I will say it's not the best design, however, the 'sites' function is definitely good for smaller ministries who just want a website, but don't need a store or anything like that.

Tithe.ly also has a wide range of pictures you can choose from. So if you're mostly online like I am, and you're a smaller ministry in need of good quality pictures, tithe.ly has an easily accessible and useable media function where you can download pictures for free and use them all over your site and in the email campaigns.

My last favorite bit of tithe.ly is their sermon section on the website. Uploads are the easiest ever, and linking pages together is easy once you know how to do it. I think the biggest pro of tithe.ly is that they offer a lot of different functions that really cover the whole workings of a ministry so you don't need to go anywhere else. I ended up needing to for more advanced needs, but if you don't want to get super flashy, then I would stick with tithe.ly. It's an excellent product.

My biggest complaint is that unless you recognize a problem with something, tithe.ly does not reach out to you. What I mean is, I had an error with the bank account on file, and for several months, all the donations through tithe.ly were not coming into the account like I thought they were. I received an email in September, stating that a deposit was on its way to my account. After that email, I stopped receiving emails about deposits and I didn't think anything of it, since I thought the first deposit was deposited.

Months later, I just happened to check my deposit area (thank God) on tithe.ly and there'd been NO deposits since September. However, tithe.ly was paid every month with the EXACT SAME bank account. When contacted, they got to the bottom of the problem (some kind of way my bank numbers were off one). I had over a thousand dollars sitting in a tithe.ly account somewhere. By the grace of God, we got the problem fixed and I haven't had any issues since.

Another con is their 'sites' tool. I love this tool! However, I hated it initially. In fact, I hated it so much I considered switching to a different website builder just because this one was so hard to understand. The tutorials don't help much with the website, there is a certain amount of prior knowledge you need to build a good site, let alone integrate anything.

The final con is the difficulty in creating new pages on the 'sites' tool and the limited site layout options.

The ease of giving attracted us the most with all the different ways to give, online, text to give through Tithely or driving traffic to our website. Using Tithley for our website has been a great combination to the giving platform as mentioned and all the information we can offer our members and others who are searching for a church. We have yet to really tap into some of the other features Tithely offer like messaging, events etc.

The app has not been the best experience so far. There as a plug and play goes, there still needs to be a request to Tithely support to change certain items ie logos, header changes etc. We do like the push message section of the app that we use on a daily/weekly basis to members who have downloaded the app. We also like the sermon notes section that we use weekly to give members a place to make notes during the service. It does need to be manually imputed but other than tha it's a great feature.

It was very easy to get started and affordable for what was being offered. I started with the free plan to see how members took to it and it was widely accepted. I upgraded due to the management system, messaging, app and website. I like how it was an all-in-one program.

I mostly disliked the constant bombardment of advertisements to upgrade or integrate with some new product they acquired while the ones they had were still running on Tithe.ly 1.0. The lack of support grew worse over time with the little bubble on the bottom right of the screen of Tithe.ly support was anything but helpful just offering up canned responses or links to outdated information or dead pages.