The grandmother test: why we built a giving page without a login screen

The problem we were trying to solve

Most church giving platforms assume their donors have a certain digital literacy. Create an account. Set a password. Remember it. Log in. Confirm your email. It's frictionless if you're 32 and comfortable online. It's a wall if you're older, or if your internet connection is spotty, or if you're in a country where email addresses aren't as universal as they are in the UK.

When we started building Ekklesia for Pentecostal and charismatic churches across West Africa and the diaspora, we saw churches losing real money because the giving mechanism was too complicated. People wanted to give. They just couldn't figure out how to get past the first screen.

So we asked ourselves a hard question: what if you could give without proving who you are?

How the page actually works

The public donor-facing giving page is exactly what it sounds like. No login. No account creation. Your congregation member walks in, taps the link you've shared, and they're immediately looking at your giving options.

They see what you're collecting for. They pick their amount. They choose a payment method. Pay by Bank. Card. Monthly standing order. If your church uses Xcel, that integrates directly. Give once. Give every month. Give without friction.

The technical side is straightforward, but the psychology is harder. We had to ask: if someone can give without logging in, how do we know who gave? How do we send them a receipt? How do we track it for Gift Aid?

The answer is simpler than most platforms make it. We ask for the basics. A name. A phone number if they want a receipt. That's it. Everything else is optional. The page doesn't demand proof. It trusts the giver.

What happens after they give

This is where the system talks to the rest of Ekklesia. When someone gives through the public page, that transaction flows into your Gift Aid Reclaim Panel. If the donor is a UK taxpayer and they've consented, the system notes it. At the end of the tax year, HMRC integration handles the reclaim paperwork. You're not chasing donor records. You're not filing manually. It's connected.

For your finance pastor, the money appears in the giving dashboard with full visibility. They can see trends. They can see which appeals are working. They can see which members are giving consistently and which members have gone quiet. That visibility is crucial for a church managing 200 to 3,500 members across multiple service units.

We also built a Fee Savings Calculator that shows you exactly what you're saving by having this integrated system instead of juggling multiple platforms. Three migration scenarios. A three year projection. Real numbers. Most churches are shocked at how much they were leaking through payment processing and manual Gift Aid admin.

Why we kept it simple

The temptation with any platform is to add features. Leaderboards. Gamification. Donor profiles. Matching gifts. We could have added all of that.

Instead, we kept asking: what does the finance pastor actually need to manage giving well? What does the member actually need to feel confident giving? What does the resident pastor need to see to know the church is healthy?

The answers were smaller than the feature list. A clean page. Fast transactions. A record. Visibility. That's it.

The native iOS giving app is there for people who want a permanent giving tool on their phone. Same simplicity. Native payment methods familiar to your congregation. Monthly subscriptions if they want them. But the public page is the real test of whether your technology trusts your people.

What we're still learning

Six months in, we're noticing patterns. Churches that use the public page aggressively, embedding it in their Sunday bulletins and broadcast messages, see different giving behaviour than churches that only mention it in passing. Volume goes up. Consistency goes up. And the giving is often from people who'd never have created an account.

We're also learning that the page works differently across different time zones and network conditions. A church in London sees one pattern. A church in Port Harcourt sees another. We're building for both, but it's not a 'set it and forget it' feature. It requires the finance pastor to think about how they're inviting people to give, and when, and through which channels.

One thing we built in response to real feedback: a Fee Savings Calculator that shows your branch exactly how much this integrated approach saves you versus paying a third-party platform, chasing Gift Aid manually, and managing bank transfers separately. Most finance pastors have never seen that calculation before. It's eye-opening.