

Addo – Online Giving for Churches - roycehaynes
http://addo.io/

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chad_oliver
Great work. I'll be keeping a close eye on this.

I think the tagline "Grow your church community and increase giving" doesn't
feel quite right. Specifically, "increase giving" sounds a little bit ...
greedy, maybe? Every church I've been in recognizes that money is useful and
necessary, but there's always that fear that people will feel like they _have_
to give in order to be a Good Christian.

I'm not really sure how to improve the tagline, but perhaps you could focus on
what money enables. The pain-point isn't that churches want more money, it's
that they want to be able do more, help more, serve more.

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roycehaynes
Chad - big thanks for your comment. I struggled on a tagline, but I think you
nailed it. Focusing on "what money enables."

After reading it more, its awkward to put money and church in the same phrase,
especially for churches.

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ceautery
>>its awkward to put money and church in the same phrase

I have attended churches that would disagree with that sentiment. :)

Can you tell us what the ADDO name means?

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roycehaynes
Addo means "to give" in latin.

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prawn
Firstly, I'm not the target market as I have nothing to do with churches. But
I think the page probably needs to show more information before the signup.
Description, diagram, screenshots, etc. I'm not even confident that I know
what it does - accept donations I guess? Some sort of church CRM? Does it do
something that other charity/donation sites don't do?

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roycehaynes
Hey prawn, appreciate the feedback.

Awhile back I built a tool for my church to accept donations online. I later
learned that 85% of donations in churches are given offline, and most churches
don't interact with their members (or future members) online effectively.
Enter Addo.

Key v0.1 features:

1\. Accept donations via Dwolla, where transaction fee is $0.25. Way less than
other payment processors.

2\. Super simple "dashboard" showing donations in intervals (weekly, monthly,
etc.)

3\. Members can check their giving history, and update account info.

I'm currently fleshing it out for other churches to use. The landing page is
pretty bare, but I hope to have more info up by end of week.

~~~
xiljin
royce, if you're ever interested in connecting your data to an online
accounting app for nonprofits (with integrated fundraising CRM and payroll),
I'd be happy to chat!

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tbrooks
Interesting to see new entrants to the church market. I built a similar
product marketed specifically to churches -
[https://simpledonation.com](https://simpledonation.com)

Here are some of the things I've learned:

Building the technology is the easy part. Stripe/Balanced (and all the other
payments APIs) have made it easy to do a payment startup.

Customer acquisition and sales is the hard part.

1) Decisions are made by committee and for normal sized churches (< 500
attendance) the decision maker is not on staff. Therefore repeatable, cost-
effective customer acquisition is really, really hard. Only a few channels are
available.

2) The buyers are generally not business thinkers. I've tested different sales
pitches, asking "would you rather have a service grow your top line by 10% OR
cut costs by 15%?" Most say "cut costs" which is actually a net loss. Meaning:
sales is consultative and educational and you have to sell it to over and over
to every person on the committee.

3) Churches have a tough time justifying $50/mo for a SaaS service. The
margins are too thin to make a lot of money in transaction rev. e.g. I
processed $30k last month and made ~$300. You need a ton of volume for the
math to make sense.

There are churches like Newspring (hi Joshua!) that are run differently and
understand the values of technology. Most of the 300,000 evangelical churches
in the US are not like that.

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shanac
Is this open to non-church religious organizations?

I have a friend who is a rabbi of a small but extremely cool, open orthodox
synagogue on the Lower East Side (he's also a former web developer) He's done
crowd funding before for the synagogue, since the building is historically
important. Due to the fact that the congregation is open to whomever showing
up, compared to other orthodox synagogues on the LES, he has an extremely tech
literate crowd.

It might be a good match if it works for not-churches.

~~~
roycehaynes
shanac - I'm currently focusing on religious organizations. Even though it may
work, the usage will feel most comfortable to churches.

Its definitely something to consider after I ship. :)

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simon
I'm a pastor (and former geek) and I would love to see more info on your
landing page before handing out an email address.

Not sure if my congregation is ready to go "online giving", but the
organization I belong to may be interested. Is this only suitable for church
congregations, or would a church organization (state level) be able to use it?

~~~
roycehaynes
heyo simon! Totally understand. This is primarily for church organizations to
manage tithes, offering, and interaction with members. But church
congregations (members) will have limited access too.

There's a great infographic that breaks down whether online giving is right
for your church. Check it out:
[http://i.imgur.com/WLysi7d.png](http://i.imgur.com/WLysi7d.png)

I'm going to update the landing page with more info here shortly...

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eieio
I'm not much of a churchgoer these days, but growing up Episcopalian I have
nothing but respect for folks for faith.

Is it cool if I send this to some of my non-techie friends/family? One of your
comments says that you haven't really shipped yet, so I'm not sure what your
target audience is at this point.

edit: for what it's worth I also think chad_oliver and blankenship nailed it
with their comments/suggestions.

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roycehaynes
heyo - please share with family/friends. I'm rolling out v0.1 very soon.

about the edit: agreed.

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intelliot
Site needs more info. Is this a startup? Or is it a non-profit?

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jscheel
I think is has a lot of potential. Two suggestions:

1\. Consider adding more information to your landing page. It's just a little
too sparse at the moment.

2\. Online giving can be a sticky subject, so I would suggest adding some
scripture and exegesis to your landing page that can help people be at ease
with it.

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roycehaynes
\- Good call. Adding more info to the landing page now.

\- I like the idea of scripture. It'll probably be something I do with a more
fleshed out landing page.

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malloreon
Will this be useful for mosques, synagogues, temples, etc?

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roycehaynes
short answer, yes. Although, I'm assuming early adopters will be Christianity
based.

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iambateman
This is cool! I've been thinking about doing something like this for a long
time.

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roycehaynes
Glad you like it. Anything specific you think I should address?

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yairharel
Much addo about nothing?

