Tithe.ly - Avis

Tithe.ly gives you the ability to receive donations in an easy-to-use format and to show all of the incoming donation amounts in an organized manner. We are able to provide the congregation the opportunity to cover the processing fee as well. Many of our church goers use the recurring giving option which makes the process even easier for the user. Reasonable fees compared to competitors.

We have not ran into any major issues that call for concern. We have had minor bugs occur, but refreshing would normally solve the issue. Tithe.ly is quick to reply if we have any questions or concerns.

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.

How easy it is to use even for beginners and those for whom technology is difficult/new.

There are still some features not as robust so we have to use a separate program that doesn't integrate with Breeze/Tithe.ly. Events Manager and externally received donations (PayPal, etc.) are too manual.

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.

I liked that Tithe.ly had reasonable fees, a clean interface, and ways to give on desktop, mobile, and via text. The option for people to use a bank account was also very important for my demographic.

Some of the options to customize the look and feel of the software are lacking (e.g. logos don't always render correctly against a white background). Some of the back-end features (like logging multiple gifts) were not intuitive at first, but got easer with practice.

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.

The fees are competitive. When compared to other companies, their prices are equal or lower. The company only charges a fee on actual donations (they DON'T charge a separate monthly fee regardless of donation amounts). They give donors an option to click a box where they will cover the fees for the donation. They also allow donors to set up recurring giving, which is an important option for us.
Tithe.ly also tracks all the electronic giving from donors, and compiles it at the end of the year in order to generate tax-statements for non-profits. It is EASY and quick. An additional feature is that you can customize your tax letter, including your logo, and any write-up you want to add to your tax letters. To generate the forms, you input the dates for the prior year, and the forms are generated. You can email them instantly, and have the option to print and mail any letters you choose. This feature ALONE makes this software worth having! The other AMAZING feature is that you can manually input any non-electronic donations into the software. This is a feature many other companies will charge you extra to use. For no additional cost, you can manually input other donations and keep track of ALL your giving in one software program. These manual entries will populate to the same tax form as the electronic giving. This feature makes this an outstanding product. I have also had questions about the software and features. I receive quick replies to my inquiry emails.

At this point I have not discovered a feature I don't like. I came to tithe.ly after using 2 other giving platform softwares, and this is, hands down, the best I have used. Probably the only drawback is just learning your way around when getting started. There is a fairly extensive options list when you log in, and can be a bit confusing at first. Don't be afraid to select options and see where they lead you. If you feel it is confusing or overwhelming, send an inquiry email or ask your question through the help menu. I had a few questions when getting started. I had quick follow up by emails/chat and even had a customer service agent call me to follow up on my questions/concerns. The agent was polite, professional and very knowledgeable and I have been MORE THAN SATISFIED with this software!

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.

Tithely gave us the ability to get rid of multiple systems in favor of one! Imagine having a place where giving, messaging, church management, website, mobile app, email, and more all integrate together! Add someone to the database, enroll them in a group, and set up an email subscription all in one spot! Plus having the all-access fee is saving us lots of money.

Integration was easy to set up, but it isn't always easy to educate our users on the things they need to know. I'd love to see easy tutorials for the end user.

The back end of the book keeping side is also very easy, at any time we can review giving statements. We are able to have a monthly statement very early in the month which again makes book keeping easier and quicker for reports to the board etc. Whereas Paypal does not have a monthly statement ready until the 10th of the month.

We don't have any con's I'm sure there is more that we could be using withing the software and don't only due to our people not doing so.