Haven’t you already felt embarrassed at offering moment because you have no cash in your pocket? This is what happened to the creators of Givt 3 years ago. They realized that in this alternative payment and digital fundraising world, there still are many cases where cash hasn’t been replaced. Indeed, to give a few coins at church, no solution existed. Discover the story of Givt!
Givt’s mission statement: to make sure that, when cash is not around, people still can give anonymously.
“People are carrying less cash. That makes sense: you can pay electronically almost everywhere and there are even places where cash is no longer accepted ”, observes Maarten Vergouwe, co-founder of Givt.
What about if you want to donate to a church then?
Indeed, the rise of electronic money hasn’t diminished the will of people to give, but made it more complicated. Especially for churches, this cashless world could become an important issue, considering that donations are key to support and renovate them.
Givt is answering this double challenge: allowing people to donate small amounts in a cashless world, and helping churches sustain part of their income.
The company, created in November 2015, started operations a few months later in May 2016. For the Givt team, this was “a real choice of living to drive and run a company and shape it in a way that you want”. And it seems they made the right decision: after 2 years of operations, results are encouraging with 130 churches using the system and approximately 3 000 donations per week.
A frictionless app for both churches and donors
At the very beginning of Givt history, even before trying to convince churches to try the app, turn them as ambassadors and offer them promotion materials, the crucial topic of donor experience and choice of a payment partner had to be defined.
Givt collects money from givers that have installed the app to a SlimPay-owned account. After calculation of the amount to push for each church, funds are distributed to churches’ bank accounts. SlimPay provides this service to Givt at low costs and high speeds. All this can be followed through a dedicated Dashboard available on Givt app.
“We can say that Givt is also behaving as a fintech as we are managing amount of cash just as a financial company would do”, explains Maarten.
But a payment solution still needed to be picked to handle the transactions. If price is always an important parameter, the capability to manage recurrency, direct debit, automation behind it with an easy integration was key: donors have to checkout once, and then are free to give each time the amount of their choice within an app that can compete with the best.
“As payment industry is very conservative, Fintechs are trying to make abstraction of banks and that’s why we are working with SlimPay: to free us time to focus on the business and not on payment with getting churches’ money in 2 days versus 5 with banks ”, observes Maarten Vergouwe. “To us at Givt, SlimPay is the ideal partner to make cashless donations simple and secure.”
Recurrency, increasing average amount and acquisition of new donors
As the members are potentially going to Church every week, giving becomes a recurring activity that is perfectly managed by Givt app in partnership with SlimPay. Indeed, one important observation has been made: average monthly amounts given digitally are a bit higher than cash! In addition, churches acquired new donors since the app is used. According to churches themselves: initial cost of Givt implementation is quickly balanced thanks to those 2 parameters.
Encouraged by this success, Givt plans to expand internationally, starting with the UK, a country with the highest donation rate per capita and where adoption rate of money transfer solutions is pretty high!
Givt started its business with churches, but the model is totally relevant for many other use cases : NGOs, street musicians, schools… we can expect to hear a lot more about Givt!
