St Ann Rainhill – Parish Giving Scheme success story

First published on: 10th November 2022

Encouraging parishioners to change the way they give to church is difficult. However, with the Parish Giving Scheme, it does not have to be. We wanted to share with you how one church’s approach has been successful in asking many of their Standing Order givers, and new givers, to move across to the Parish Giving Scheme.

St Ann’s Church in Rainhill has had great success by standing at the door after service and asking people to use the Parish Giving Scheme as the way to give to their church, over 50 individuals in the last few months have already signed up to give instead of using envelopes, standing orders or cash.

PCC Secretary, Sheila, says, “The PCC agreed to enroll with PGS and to lead by example by all switching our giving.”

A fellow PCC member, and Verger, spoke to the congregation explaining the issues in paying cash or cheques into the bank, which include;

  • The nearest HSBC with counter service was in Runcorn which also meant paying a bridge toll in each direction.
  • Lack of volunteers to count & bank money.
  • At the time not having a gift aid Secretary or Treasurer.

He explained the benefit of using the PGS to give electronically to the church would eliminate these issues and the PCC had all switched to PGS. They took advantage of the bespoke leaflets and PGS forms that the Diocese provided and made sure that they were available to hand out to everyone after the service. They also promoted PGS by email and phone messages.

He said “I sent an email with all the PGS information to parishioners whose contact details we had and also put the information on the parish WhatsApp group. Joan and I spoke to individual members of our church family, offered help to anyone requiring it & even posted the forms for them. The clergy have also discussed it from the front of Church.”

St Ann’s also has a Fresh Expressions group called Platform 2 which experiments with different types of worship for all ages. “We still have work to do to discuss it with our fresh expression & Thursday morning congregations, which is an ongoing project.”

Sheila also adds,

“The benefit of getting the money through in one amount with the gift aid following a few days later allows for much easier budgeting.”

Benefits of churches joining the Parish Giving Scheme also include;

  • For those who pay tax, Gift Aid is automatically claimed on their donations and is credited to the church bank account that same month – with no administrative work for your church volunteers
  • Sign-up and registration is quick and easy – givers can sign up online, by paper gift form, or call the friendly PGS customer service team.
  • Pastoral reorganisation is smooth and easy because your givers do not have to manually change their standing order – the church simply updates their bank details with PGS
  • Givers are totally in control of what they give and can opt-in increase their donation annually with the rate of inflation

The introduction of the Parish Giving scheme since its rollout in Liverpool in 2015 90% of our churches offer PGS as the way to give and they have has seen over 3,700 individuals across our diocese sign up to make regular gifts to their church.

If your church is yet to sign up, or would like to discuss a new approach to implement the Parish Giving Scheme, we encourage you to get in touch with Resources Officer, Cath Gaskell at Liverpool Diocese. Cath.gaskell@liverpool.anglican.org 

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