Custom Church Giving System with Stripe & Notion

If you have a small church or ministry, you may not need a full fledged ChMS and giving system. With modern tools like Stripe (a payment processor) and Notion, you can be in full control or your church’s giving. We’ll dive into how you can use Stripe’s payment links feature along with automation to create an advanced giving system focused on discipleship.

Why use Stripe?

• Easy checkout

Stripe has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into creating a seamless, optimized checkout experience for users. Take advantage of their hard work to make sure you’re not losing any gifts due to unneeded friction.

• Givers can save their details

Stripe automatically prompts users to save their bank account or credit card details in a secure manner attached to their phone number. Making giving a easy couple button clicks every time.

• Secure

Stripe is PCI compliant and uses secure technology like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to transport card info. You can rest assured knowing Stripe takes great care of all customer data (including yours).

• Integrates with everything (incl Quickbooks)

Weather you’re using Excel, Quickbooks or another accounting software, Stripe probably integrates with them out of the box.

• Full control over your church’s giving system

Using stripe gives you direct access to the payment processor. This will allow you to build a ‘no-code’ system that suits the needs of your ministry directly. No more feature requests to giving tools, buggy headaches, etc. You’re in the drivers seat.

Overview

Here’s what we’ll be creating. When donors head to stripe to give, we’ll automatically sync their gifts and details to Notion. You’ll be able to see who’s giving, who’s lapsed and who could use some encouragement to start tithing all in the context of the rest of your discipleship pipeline in Notion.

Step 1: Set up Stripe Payment Link

After you sign up for Stripe (see this article for more info on how to do that), you’ll want to create a payment link. A payment link is essentially the link you’ll share with your people to allow them to give online. You can customize this link to be branded with your church’s look and feel, enable / disable payment methods (such as Apple Pay or Google Pay) and much more. Check out our guide on how to create a payment link for your church below.

Step 2: Set up Notion

Once you’ve got your Stripe payment link up and running, it’s time to set up Notion for your church. After you sign up for Notion (it’s free), all you have to do is duplicate my template. This will load my connection pipeline and giving tracker Notion tools into your new Notion account. Check out the video below for a full walkthrough of my giving tracker Notion template.

Go to people tracker Notion template

Step 3: Set up Zapier

🚨 I'd highly recommend watching the video for this section as it'll be significantly easier to follow along if you don't have advanced experience with Zapier. 🚨

Congrats, you’re on the home stretch! Here’s where the magic really happens: automate your church’s giving system with Zapier + Notion together. Zapier is an automation platform that allows you to connect different tools together. You can think of Zapier as the post office for tools, they help tools package up info and send it to each other. Similar to how to post office helps people exchange packages and info via their distribution networks.

Each automation in Zapier is called a Zap. You can create Zaps to automate everything from sending donation info from Stripe to Notion (like we'll do here) to sending automated emails with your gmail account. Every Zap has a trigger, which is what tells the zap to start. The trigger in this case will be a 'New Payment' event from Stripe. This is fired by Stripe when someone gives via your Donation Link.

After a Zap is triggered, it runs through a series of steps. Each step does a bit of work for us and when all the steps are complete, we will have automated some task. Below I'll give you an overview of the Zap you'll need to set up in order to get Stripe talking to Notion.

💡 You will need a paid Zapier plan for automation to run. At the time of writing this article, plans start at $29/mo. You’ll be able to use Zapier for a bunch of other automation like the following:

• Automate your connection process with Zapier + Notion
• Volunteer training pipeline with Notion + Zapier
• Create a Personal 'Thank You' System for Church Donors

Zap Steps

Get the Zap template here

• Step 1: New Payment in Stripe

Step 1 is always the Zap trigger. Here we'll integrate our Stripe account so we can listen for a 'New Payment' event. This event fires in Stripe every time you receive a new payment - IE someone donates with a Stripe link. Stripe will send over the donor's info, the amount and other details we can use.

• Step 2: Format Created At

Next we need to convert the date & time Stripe sent us. Stripe sends a 'timestamp' which is just a technical format computer systems use to store time. This step will convert the time to a human readable format that will go into Notion.

• Step 3: Find or Create Notion Person Record

This is where the magic starts. We're going to search for a person in our church's Notion person tracker database with the same email as the Stripe payment that just came through. If the person was found, we'll use that person to link this donation to them in Notion. If they aren't found, we'll simply create a person with the correct details. This means that someone will enter your people tracking system (or connection pipeline) whenever they give.

You'll need to integrate your Notion account for this step. It should be pretty easy. Just make sure you've signed up, duplicated my connection pipeline template and shared access to that template's database once the integration is complete. If you run into errors, don't hesitate to reach out to me and schedule a call.

When Zapier asks you which database you'd like to integrate, make sure to chose the 'Connection Pipeline' database (not the 'Giving' database - we'll use that one next).

• Step 4: Create Notion Giving Record

Next we'll store info about this donation in Notion. This step is pretty simple. We'll re-use the same Notion integration we set up in the previous step. But, we'll select the 'Giving' database this time. Here we also won't search for a record, rather we'll just create a new record with the donation's data that we can link to the person from step three later.

• Step 5: Link Giving to Person

Now the final step. Linking the new gift record from step 4 with the person record from step 3. The Notion integration doesn't allow you to update the 'Relation' data type in Notion, so we'll have to do that manually.

First, you'll need to create an 'Internal Integration' that will allow you direct access to Notion's data. Follow this guide from Notion on how to do that. After you've created that integration head to your integrations and copy your Internal Integration Secret (it will start with 'secret_') for use in the following zap. Also make sure the integration has access to your 'Giving' database. See the following picture on how to give your internal integration access to your giving database.

Here's the final Zap steps.

Wrapping Up Your Notion Giving Database

Shew, that was a lot! I definitely recommend booking a call with me so we can get this set up for you. Once you get these tools in place it's easy to customize them, and there won't be any maintenance (like software updates, etc) to keep up with so once it's up, it's up. It's a lot easier to customize a template than start from scratch or create your own.

If you're a church plant or a small church, I'd love to connect with you to see how I can help streamline your giving system.