Options for Giving
The suspension of worship services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has lead Holy Trinity Lutheran Church to expand the ways offerings can be received by the church now and into the future. This article outlines options currently available to you.
Option 1:
Place your offering in an envelope and mail it to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 209 Broad St, Anderson, SC 29621. This option is the easiest way to send in your offering and incurs minimal cost to you, a $0.55 stamp, and no processing cost to the church. It allows you to easily earmark your donation to various categories. Using the USPS may be old school; but most of us have paid bills in this manner for many years.
Option 2:
Use your bank’s bill payment service. You can logon to your bank website, go to their payment center and create a ‘company’ payee for HTLC. Most banks will ask for the following information:
• Name of payee (Holy Trinity Lutheran Church),
• Address (209 Broad St, Anderson SC 29621,
• Telephone number (864-224-4220),
• Account number (use the number on your envelope), and
• Contact email address (htlc@htlc-anderson.com).
Once this information is entered, you can have your bank send your offering to HTLC on a date specified by you. HTLC will not be known to your bank as an Automatic Clearing House (ACH) partner and thus the bank will mail a check to HTLC usually 5 days prior to the date you request it be delivered. The check will arrive at HTLC in all appearances as if written and sent by you. Most banks prefer to use ACH withdrawal and deposit to send funds from your account to the payee account but have their own internal processes for determining if ACH will be used for a payee account. Over time, your bank may switch to using ACH vs. the US Mail, it is up to them.
One of the benefits of using your bank’s bill payment system is that you can have your pre-specified offering automatically sent on your schedule. Another benefit is that using your bank’s bill payment system is normally done without cost to you, check with your bank to make certain, and there is no processing cost to HTLC.
The major limitation to using bill pay is that the memo line on a check is usually limited to 32 characters making it difficult to designate multiple categories for your offering
Option 3:
Use Holy Trinity Lutheran Church’s new eGiving option. The ELCA has two preferred partners for eGiving — Tithe.ly and Vanco’s GivePlus. HTLC has selected Tithe.ly as our processor for eGiving. This means that you now have the option of making your offering by credit card or from a checking account via an ACH withdrawal. Tithe.ly allows you to apportion your gift by category and schedule automatic reoccurring offerings to HTLC among other options.
There is no cost to you to create a Tithe.ly account. However, there is a cost to the church each time you use Tithe.ly to make your offering. The costs incurred by HTLC for each transaction are:
Credit Card (other than AMEX): 2.4% of the gift + $0.25
AMEX Credit Card: 3.5% of the gift + $0.25
ACH/eCheck: 0.5% of the gift + $0.25
When you make a donation to the church using Tithe.ly you will have the option of “Covering the Fee”. For example, if you wish to use your VISA card to give $75 and elect to cover the cost of the processing in order that HTLC receive the full $75, your card would be charged $77.10, which is ($75 + $0.25) / (1 – (2.4 / 100)). If you covered the cost of an ACH withdrawal for a $75 donation, the amount would be $75.63.
To use Tithe.ly for eGiving, you need an account. You can create your account at any time by
going to https://get.tithe.ly/ and click on the red “SIGN UP FREE” button, then click the “GIVE TO CHURCH” option which will take you to a page that allows you to “GIVE
ONLINE”, which will take you to a page where you can create your account. Or, carefully type the direct path to create an account:
https://tithe.ly/give_new/www/#/tithely/give
At the date of this writing, March 29th, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Anderson will NOT be visible in the Tithe.ly app church list as our enrollment is in progress.
If you check the HTLC website (https://htic-anderson.org ) occasionally, you will know when eGiving is operational — a “Give” button or link will appear on our web page that will take you to Tithe.ly site where you can create a userid, set up your checking account or credit card as the source of your giving and begin using the service to send your offerings to HTLC. Lastly, there is an iPhone and Android app for Tithe.ly.
Option 4:
Soon, very soon we hope, the offering plate will be passed in worship service to collect your
offerings. But until then, please consider one of the above three options to give.
Feel free to reach out to Mike Cox (email: salzburg1951@gmail.com or cell: 301-788-8420) if you have questions.
