For Faith Communities
Most congregations do not need this. Here is how to tell if yours does.
The median US congregation has 65 regular adults (NSCEP, 2018) and no donor database. If that is you, spend your money elsewhere. If you are one of the larger ones, the national data points at a specific gap.
In short. Independent research (NSCEP, 2018) finds 94% of congregations acknowledge gifts quarterly or less, and 75% discuss giving in worship that rarely. Gratefully reads the donor records you already keep and prompts stewardship week by week. It suits larger congregations, faith-based nonprofits and diocesan development offices working a single donor file, not a 65 person church.
On this page
The honest qualifier, before anything else
The National Study of Congregations' Economic Practices, produced by the Lake Institute on Faith and Giving at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, is the most thorough study of congregational finances in a generation. When it fielded in 2018 it found the median congregation in the United States had 65 regularly participating adults and received about $169,000 in a year. 64% had fewer than 100 regular adults and 28% received less than $100,000. A second wave has been collected and is expected in early 2027, so treat these as structural rather than current, but nothing since suggests the shape has changed.
A congregation that size does not have a donor database, a development officer or a stewardship committee, and it should not buy software to solve a problem it can solve with a notebook and a person who knows everybody's name. We would be a poor purchase and we would rather say so here than in a sales call.
The same study found 22% of congregations receive half a million dollars or more in a year. That group, along with large synagogues and mosques, faith-based nonprofits with a development function, and the development office of a diocese or denominational body working its own donor file, is who the rest of this page is for.
One precision on that last one, because it would otherwise be misleading. Gratefully works on one organization's records at a time. A diocesan or denominational development office with its own donor file and its own appeal is a good fit. A diocese wanting to roll up giving across eighty parishes into one view is not something we do today.
The gap the national data actually shows
First, where religious giving stands now. These are the current figures, from Giving USA 2026, reporting on 2025.
Note: Giving USA counts congregations, religious media and missions together as "religion".
| Finding | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Total US charitable giving, 2025 | $617.2 billion, up 5.7%, the highest ever in current dollars | Giving USA 2026 |
| Given to religion, 2025 | About $152 billion, up 2.4% | Giving USA 2026 |
| The same figure adjusted for inflation | Down 0.2% | Giving USA 2026 |
| Religion's share of all US giving, 2024 and 2025 | 23%, still the largest single subsector | Giving USA 2026 |
| The same share, 1991 to 1995 | 49% | Giving USA 2026 |
| The same share, 2001 to 2005, and 2011 to 2015 | 38%, then 33% | Giving USA 2026 |
| Religiously engaged donors intending to maintain or increase future giving | 81% | Dunham+Company and Giving USA Foundation survey, 2025 |
| Americans with no religious affiliation, 2024 | 28%, against 16% in 2006 | PRRI |
Religion is still the largest destination for charitable dollars in the country, and it is still growing in cash terms. It is also flat once inflation is accounted for, and its share has fallen by half in thirty years. Both of those are true at once.
Second, how congregations actually operate. These figures come from NSCEP, which remains the most thorough study of congregational finances ever done, but it fielded in 2018 and reports 2017 revenue. Read them as structural rather than current. A second wave has been collected and Lake Institute expects to publish it in early 2027.
| Finding | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Congregations that acknowledge donors' gifts quarterly or less | 94% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Congregations that discuss giving in worship quarterly or less | 75% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Share of congregational income from regular individual contributions | 81% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Of that, share given during a worship service | 75% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Median regularly participating adults per congregation | 65 | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Congregations with fewer than 100 regular adults | 64% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Congregations receiving $500,000 or more a year | 22% | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Median annual revenue | About $169,000 | NSCEP, 2018 |
| Congregations where no single generation is more than half of attenders | 53% | NSCEP, 2018 |
The 94% figure (NSCEP, 2018) is the one worth sitting with. Almost every congregation in the country thanks its givers four times a year or less, while 81% of its income arrives from those same people. That is not a technology problem and no software fixes it on its own. But it is a rhythm problem, and rhythm is something a system can hold when a small staff cannot.
Put the two tables together and the picture is not decline, it is concentration. The money going to religion is close to flat in real terms while the share of Americans with no affiliation keeps rising, which means more of the total is coming from fewer, more committed households. 81% of religiously engaged donors say they intend to maintain or increase their giving. Those are the people already in your records, and thanking them four times a year is the weakest link in the chain.
Why this is harder for a congregation than for a charity
Three things make faith-based stewardship genuinely different, and any tool that ignores them is the wrong tool.
Giving is congregational, not transactional. A member who gives every week is not a donor in a campaign funnel. They are a household with a pastoral relationship, and language borrowed from direct-response fundraising reads badly in that context.
Money is a difficult subject from the front. NSCEP (2018) found three quarters of congregations discuss giving quarterly or less. The answer is rarely to ask more often. It is usually to thank more specifically.
Generations sit in one room. In 53% of congregations (NSCEP, 2018) no single generation is more than half the attenders. Segmenting by age the way a charity would cuts across families who are in the same pew.
What Gratefully does for a stewardship team
Grace, the assistant inside Gratefully, reads the records you already keep, builds a private knowledge graph your organization owns, and works through them overnight.
| What you get | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| A daily action list, plus a weekly recap | Who needs attention now, with the reason on each card and one-click next steps. A weekly summary lands in your inbox |
| Stewardship moments surfaced for you | Giving anniversaries, unacknowledged major gifts and timely welcomes for first-time givers. Against the 94% figure above, this is the row that matters most |
| Answers with citations | Ask in plain language and get an answer grounded in your records, cited and specific |
| Calculated giving figures | Reports use exact numbers from your data, never approximations |
| Lapsed recurring gifts flagged | A stopped monthly gift is often the first sign someone is drifting, and it rarely surfaces on its own |
| Drafted notes in your own voice | Thank-you and stewardship notes, re-engagement letters and year-end asks, grounded in real giving history. Gratefully learns your voice from your website during setup |
| Continuity across staff changes | When a stewardship lead or clergy member moves on, Gratefully generates a handover package per donor with history, context, next steps and risk flags |
That last row matters more in faith settings than almost anywhere else, because pastoral knowledge is usually held by one or two people and almost never written down.
What closing the 94% gap actually looks like
Not a transformation, and not a campaign. A rhythm that holds when the week gets away from you.
On a Monday, the list is already there: the family whose monthly gift stopped in August, the member who quietly moved from $50 to $500 and was thanked with the same generic receipt as everyone else, the giving anniversary falling on Thursday, the first-time giver from two weeks ago who has heard nothing since. Each one carries the reason it is on the list and the records behind it, so you are deciding what to say rather than working out who to say it to.
Then somebody writes the notes. That part does not change and should not. What changes is that the deciding stops eating the morning, and the person who quietly tripled their giving does not go unthanked for a year because nobody happened to notice.
If your congregation already does this reliably, with a stewardship committee that meets and a system that flags the anniversaries, you do not need us and we would rather you kept your money. The NSCEP 2018 figure suggests most do not, and that it is rarely for lack of caring.
What we do not do
No wealth screening and no capacity ratings. We will not tell you what a member could give. For a congregation that would be a serious breach of trust, and we do not offer it to anyone.
No prospect research. We read your records. We do not go looking for new names in outside databases.
No giving predictions dressed up as insight. Where we show a number, it is calculated from your data and you can see the records behind it.
Not a church management system. We do not replace Planning Center, Ministry Platform, Realm or anything else. We sit on top of what you already run.
No tithe or pledge collection. We do not process gifts. Your existing giving platform keeps doing that.
Three questions to ask in your first week
The answers depend entirely on your own records, so we have not invented sample results.
- "Which households gave regularly last year and have not given in three months?" The quiet drift that rarely shows up until the annual review.
- "Who increased their giving this year and has not been thanked for it?" Given the 94% figure, this list is usually longer than anyone expects.
- "What do we know about this family's involvement over the last ten years?" Pulls records, notes and correspondence into one place, with sources.
It works with what you already have
There is no migration. Gratefully connects directly to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, Bloomerang and Little Green Light, syncing automatically overnight, plus Mailchimp, CSV import and document upload for everything else. Every integration is included on every plan, including the free one.
Being straight about what that means for a congregation: none of those three is a church giving platform. If you run Planning Center, Tithe.ly, Pushpay, Subsplash or a church management system, you are working through CSV export and document upload rather than an automatic sync. That is a real limitation, not a detail, and it is the thing most likely to make us the wrong choice for you today. Worth testing with one export before you decide.
What it costs
Start free at $0 for one person, forever, no card. Every account begins with a 14 day trial of Advanced, our top plan, and moves to Free when it ends rather than locking. Paid plans are $79, $399 and $799 a month. Full detail on the pricing page.
For a congregation weighing this against other priorities, the Free plan is a genuine answer rather than a teaser. It is metered, though, and you should know the limits before planning around it: one person, five things to do each week and ten AI answers a month, with your givers kept in sync throughout. Enough to judge whether it earns its place. Not enough to run a stewardship programme on.
On putting congregational records into AI tools
Congregational records are unusually sensitive. They can reveal financial hardship, family circumstances and pastoral confidences, and members never agreed to any of it being typed into a chatbot. Consumer AI plans do not come with the agreements this kind of data needs.
Identifying details are removed before anything reaches a language model, your data never trains anyone's AI, and each organization sits in an isolated tenant. If you are writing rules for your own staff and volunteers first, our AI acceptable use policy template is free and ungated.
Frequently asked questions
We are a small church. Should we use this?
Probably not, and we would rather be straight about it. The median US congregation has 65 regular adults and about $169,000 of annual income (NSCEP, 2018), and at that size a person who knows everyone beats any software. The Free plan costs nothing if you want to see for yourself, but we are built for larger congregations, faith-based nonprofits and diocesan development offices that have a development function and a single donor file.
Do we have to move off Planning Center or our church management system?
No. Gratefully does not replace your ChMS or your giving platform and does not collect gifts. It reads the records you already keep, through a direct connection where we have one and through CSV and document upload otherwise.
Does it tell us how much members could afford to give?
No. We do not do wealth screening or capacity ratings, for any customer. We show what people have actually done, from your own records, with the records visible behind every figure.
Is this just automated thank-you letters?
No. It decides who should be thanked and why, which is the part that usually fails, then drafts something a person edits and sends. A note nobody read before sending is worse than no note.
How does it handle households rather than individuals?
Honestly, this is worth testing against your own file before you commit. Gratefully reads the records as your system structures them, so household grouping depends on how your giving platform records it, and there is no purpose-built household model on our side. It matters in congregations, where families give together and 53% of congregations have no single dominant generation (NSCEP, 2018), so we would rather flag it than let you assume.
Do you connect to Planning Center, Tithe.ly, Pushpay or Subsplash?
Not directly, and this is the most common reason we are the wrong fit for a congregation today. Our direct connectors are Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, Bloomerang and Little Green Light, none of which is a typical church giving platform. Everything else comes in through CSV export and document upload, which works and is how most congregations would start, but it is a manual step rather than an overnight sync. If that sounds like friction you do not want, it probably is.
Can a diocese or denomination see all its congregations in one place?
No. Gratefully works on one organization's records at a time, so a diocesan development office can use it for its own donor file and its own appeal, but there is no roll-up view across many parishes or member congregations. If that is what you are looking for, we are not it.
Who on our team can see what?
You invite the people you choose and they share the same organizational context, with team access controls on top. Worth thinking through before you import, because congregational giving records carry pastoral sensitivities that a charity's donor file usually does not. Decide who should see giving amounts before anyone does.
What happens when our stewardship lead leaves?
The knowledge graph belongs to the organization, not the person, so notes, history and context stay and can be handed on. In faith settings this is often the strongest single reason to have one.
Sources
- Giving USA 2026: The Annual Report on Philanthropy, reporting on 2025, researched and written by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IU Indianapolis and published by the Giving USA Foundation. Figures here are taken from Lake Institute's analysis of it by Erica Dollhopf, PhD, Associate Director of Research, published 14 July 2026. Read the analysis.
- The National Study of Congregations' Economic Practices, Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. Fielded in 2018, reporting 2017 revenue. A second wave has been collected and Lake Institute expects to release findings in early 2027. Read the report.
- NSCEP first findings summary, Lake Institute. Read the summary.