How do you take donations or tithes online?

Taking donations or tithes online works through a giving tool, a service built for exactly this. You sign up, connect your organization's bank account, and put a give button on your website. The tool shows a simple giving form, handles the card or bank payment securely, keeps a small fee, and sends the rest to your bank. You never touch anyone's card details, and you do not need to know any code.

Quick answer

• Online giving runs through a giving tool made for churches and nonprofits, like Tithe.ly, Givelify, or PayPal's donation tools.
• You connect the tool to your organization's bank account, then add a give button to your website. The tool handles the whole payment part.
• Givers can set up a repeating gift, weekly or monthly, so giving stays steady even on the weeks they are away. This is the biggest practical win of going online.
• The tools in this guide have no monthly charge for basic giving. They keep a small fee out of each gift instead.
• The tool also keeps the records: receipts for every gift and a history the giver can see, which makes tax time easier for everyone.

How does online giving actually work?

There are three parts, and the giving tool handles all of them.

The giving page. The tool gives you a form or page where someone chooses an amount, picks what the gift is for, and pays. You put a give button on your website that opens it. Some tools let the form sit right inside your website, others open a page the tool hosts for you. Either way, you do not build anything.

The payment. The tool collects the card or bank details on its own secure form, the same way an online store's checkout does. Your organization never sees or stores a card number. The tool takes its fee out of the gift and deposits the rest into your bank account.

The records. The giver gets a receipt by email, and the tool keeps a running history of every gift. The office can see what came in and what it was for, and givers can look up their own giving.

Here is what that feels like in practice. Maria opens your website on her phone, taps give, types 50, picks the food pantry fund, and pays. She ticks one box to make it monthly. From then on her gift arrives on its own, she gets a receipt each time, and your treasurer sees it all in one place.

What makes a giving tool different from a store checkout?

If you have read our guide on taking payments on your website, you might wonder why you would not just use a regular checkout. A checkout is built for buying things once. Giving works differently in three ways, and giving tools are built around all three.

Repeating gifts are the normal case. Tithes and regular support come weekly or monthly. A giving tool makes "make this monthly" a single tick at giving time, and steady, repeating gifts are what smooth out the summer dip every treasurer knows.

Gifts point at something. People do not add a tithe to a cart. They give to the building fund, the youth trip, or wherever the need is. Giving tools let you set up those funds so every gift lands in the right bucket without anyone sorting it by hand.

Givers need a yearly summary. For taxes, a giver wants one statement showing everything they gave all year. A giving tool produces that. A store checkout would hand them a pile of order confirmations instead.

If your organization also sells things, like books or event tickets, that part really is checkout territory, and the payments guide above covers it. For gifts, use a giving tool.

Which giving tools do people actually use?

You do not need to research twenty options. For a first-timer, three names cover most situations.

Tithe.ly is built for churches. Its giving form can sit right on your website, givers can set up repeating gifts, and it also takes gifts by text message and through an app. If your congregation says tithe and offering, the tool speaks that language too.

Givelify is a giving app. People download it, find your church or nonprofit, and give from their phone in a few taps. It suits congregations where most giving happens in the moment, from a seat, on a phone.

PayPal offers donation buttons and pages that many small nonprofits start with, because givers already know PayPal and setting up a donation page requires no code. Organizations that confirm their registered charity status with PayPal get its lower charity rate on each gift.

There is no single right answer here. A church usually feels most at home on a tool made for churches. A small nonprofit taking occasional donations can start simpler. Pick one, tell people about it, and let it run.

What does online giving cost?

None of the three tools above charges a monthly amount for basic giving. Each keeps a fee out of every gift, and the shape is a small percentage plus a fixed amount.

• Tithe.ly charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for a card gift, and 1% plus 30 cents when the gift comes straight from a bank account (Tithe.ly, 2026).
• Givelify charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per donation (Givelify, 2026).
• PayPal charges confirmed charities 1.99% plus 49 cents per donation (PayPal, 2026).

To make that real: a $100 card gift through Tithe.ly costs $3.20 in fees, so $96.80 reaches the bank. The same gift straight from a bank account costs $1.30, which is why it is worth gently pointing regular givers toward the bank option when they set up a repeating gift.

Two more things soften the fees. Many giving tools offer the giver a checkbox to add the fee on top of the gift, so the organization receives the full amount. Tithe.ly, for example, builds this option into its giving form, and plenty of givers use it. And compared with what it replaces, the math is friendly: a fee of a few percent, in exchange for gifts that keep arriving steadily all year, is a trade most treasurers take without hesitating.

How do you put giving on your website?

The website's job is small and important: make the give button impossible to miss and easy to trust.

Put a give button in your menu and near the top of your first page. Point it at your giving page or form. Next to it, add one short, warm line about what giving supports. "Your giving keeps the food pantry stocked and the lights on" does more than a paragraph of finance language.

Then tell your congregation, clearly and more than once, that the button on the website is the one official place to give online. When everyone knows that, a strange text message asking for gift cards is instantly recognizable as fake.

All of this assumes you have a website to put the button on. If you do not yet, our guide on making a website for a church or ministry walks through the whole thing, and the giving button is one small piece of it.

How do you get people to actually use it?

Adding the button is half the job. The other half is making online giving feel normal.

Announce it from the front, and show it once. One minute of someone giving on their phone, live, does more than a month of bulletin notices. People hesitate because they have never seen it done, not because they object.

Invite repeating gifts specifically. Most people never think to set one up until someone explains it: give the way you already planned to, once, and it continues on its own. For the organization, ten families on monthly giving is steadier ground than any single big gift.

And keep every old way of giving open. The plate, the envelope, the check in the mail all still work. Online giving is not a change in what generosity means. It is just the same generosity, with one less thing in the way.

If you want the rest of your website to come together the same way, built around your organization instead of a generic template, start with a prompt built around you.