Shift Your Gift was a strategic giving‑transition campaign I helped lead when our church migrated from a legacy custom giving system to a modern provider, OnlineGiving.org. The old system lacked the ability to transfer payment methods or recurring gift schedules, meaning every recurring donor needed to manually recreate their giving profile—a scenario that typically results in major drop‑off or lost recurring revenue.
To prevent attrition and improve donor experience, I helped design a clear, trust‑building communication strategy that educated our congregation on why the change was necessary, what benefits it offered, and how simple it would be to move their gifts. Our marketing director titled the campaign and our graphics lead designed the wordmark — while I produced step‑by‑step guides, digital messaging, support materials, FAQs, platform prompts, and visual assets to remove friction and encourage participation.
Despite the inherent challenges of a manual transition, the campaign exceeded expectations. We not only retained recurring givers—we increased overall recurring giving participation. Even more significantly, because of intentional education efforts, 67% of donors chose ACH instead of credit cards – reducing processing fees, improving long‑term reliability of gifts, and strengthening the church’s financial sustainability. This campaign is now considered the most successful giving transition in the organization’s history, demonstrating the power of thoughtful communication, digital clarity, and donor‑centered design.
More than a Migration: Vendor Selection + Product Influence
Behind the campaign was a longer body of work. Before the migration itself, I led the evaluation and selection process — vetting multiple giving providers and weighing technical fit, congregational experience, and long-term viability. Notably, the runner-up vendor has since gone out of business, which I think speaks to the importance of selection alongside execution.
Once we’d selected OnlineGiving.org, I served as the staff lead through the entire cutover. The technical execution was handled by our database vendor’s professional services team and by OnlineGiving.org’s implementation team, but I was the one navigating between them — coordinating timing, scope, and decisions across multiple vendors. I also worked closely with a third-party app vendor connected to our church database to ensure their integration handled the cutover gracefully and supported seamless authentication with the new provider.
As part of the onboarding work itself, I advocated for two product improvements I believed were essential to the campaign’s success: donor-facing education on processing fees inside the donation flow, and fund descriptions in the giving interface so donors understood exactly where their gifts were going. OnlineGiving.org built both, and they were live in time for our launch. They were a meaningful part of why we landed at 67% ACH adoption and grew recurring giving through the transition. Both features were ultimately rolled out to all OnlineGiving.org customers and remain part of the platform today. Beyond the product changes, OnlineGiving.org has since adopted the migration playbook I built into how they coach their other church customers through similar transitions.
