I thought I'd post a little of SimpleGive's history, as this is a fairly common question that we receive from potential customers.
Ben and I actually became friends in youth group at church almost 20 years ago. We both have 10 years of professional IT experience. Ben graduated from
Johnson Bible College and met his wife there, and she now works in ministry. I graduated from a small private college, and am married to my high school sweetheart.
Ben and I were working to launch a different company (providing hosted Exchange Server accounts) in early 2006. I am a developer and have always been interested in figuring out new areas to use my talents, so I was using my development knowledge to create some of the tools in-house. One of the modules I was working on was an online payment module for our new company. I had worked on a payment module for other businesses (i.e. -
Sentry Parental Controls ), so it was pretty easy for me to do. I decided to post on some technical boards an offer to complete payment modules for other companies as a way to build up some extra funds for our new company.
We were approached by a church in the summer of 2006 (
Faith Apostolic of Carmel). They had seen my post on the board, and were looking for someone to develop an online giving module for their church. They had researched the few church online giving companies and felt like they either didn't meet their needs or were too expensive. We worked with them over the next 3 or 4 months designing and developing an online giving system for their church. In doing the design and development, we realized this was a great area to go into and it really fit our individual interests and experience (both professional and personal).
We felt we could create an online giving service that allowed small and medium-sized churches to accept online giving, since many people (including us) rarely carry cash or checks. Both of our families use debit cards to pay for everything. Debit cards allow us to remain debt free, but still have the convenience of a card.
Faith Apostolic of Carmel launched their church online giving site in January of 2007. We started marketing our church online giving service in the Spring of 2007 and have been growing ever since then.
Jason
Founding Partner
SimpleGive
