A QR code for church giving

The noticeboard outlives the giving platform

Most printed QR codes are ephemera. A church noticeboard is the opposite: a card put up this autumn can still be there in five years, because nobody owns the job of taking it down. Meanwhile the PCC revisits its giving arrangements on a completely different clock. Fees change, or a new treasurer arrives with a view on what worked at their last church. None of that is a problem until you notice that the code on the board encodes the old platform’s donation address directly. Switch platforms and every poster and pew card printed against it goes dead, while looking exactly the same.

There are two honest ways round this, and both work:

• Point the code at a page you control. A giving page on the church’s own website, which forwards to whichever platform the PCC uses this year. The printed code never changes because the address it holds never changes. This costs nothing and needs no subscription; it does need a website and somebody who can edit it, which not every parish has.
• Use a dynamic code and repoint it. The printed pattern holds a short link, and where that link forwards is changed from an account. When the platform changes, the noticeboard does not. This is a running cost and should go in the budget as one.

What does not work is printing the platform’s address straight into a static code and hoping the decision holds. It might. The card will be up longer than the hope.

It sits alongside whatever the PCC chooses

The code is a pointer, and the choice of what it points at is a separate decision made on fees, Gift Aid handling and what the diocese supports. The options a treasurer will actually be weighing:

• The Parish Giving Scheme handles regular committed giving by direct debit and processes Gift Aid on the parish’s behalf. It is built for the monthly giver rather than the visitor with a phone, so it usually sits alongside a one-off route rather than replacing it.
• Give A Little provides online giving pages and campaign pages, and is one of the platforms Parish Resources names in its QR code guidance.
• CAF offers donation processing for charities, including churches, with Gift Aid handled in the flow.
• A plain donation page on the church website, if the parish already has one it trusts.

All of them give you a web address, and a web address is all a code needs. One warning belongs here rather than at the end: the Church of England’s own guidance tells parishes that codes from some free generators stop working after a limited time. The charity fundraising guide quotes it in full, alongside dated accounts from fundraisers it happened to, and covers the static-or-dynamic decision properly. If you read one other page before printing, read that one.

Gift Aid happens on the page, not in the code

A QR code cannot carry a Gift Aid declaration. All it can do is deliver somebody to a page, so the page has to do the work: the declaration captured in the same flow as the payment, not left as a separate step for the donor to remember. Every platform above does this on its own donation pages. If you build your own page, that is the one requirement worth checking twice, because a missing declaration quietly costs the parish 25p in every pound. The GOV.UK wording, and where the small donations scheme does and does not apply, is in the charity guide.

Printing for a congregation that did not grow up scanning things

The technical minimum for a scannable code is not the right target here. Design for the person furthest from the technology, because in most congregations that person is real and gives generously.

• Go well above the minimum size. The floor is 15mm across; on an A4 noticeboard poster, 40mm costs nothing and scans from a comfortable distance without the hover-and-squint. Steadying a phone at arm’s length is harder for older hands than most artwork assumes.
• Contrast is not a design choice. A dark code on a white panel. Not gold on cream to match the service sheet, not reversed out of a photograph. Codes tolerate less styling than the parish magazine does.
• Eye level, on the board, not the top corner. And if the noticeboard lives behind glass, watch for reflections: a porch light opposite the case can make the code unreadable at exactly the times people pass it.
• Pew cards should stand, not lie. A stiff card in the book rack survives; a flyer laid flat on the pew gets tidied away by Thursday.
• Print the address in words under the code. Somebody with an older phone, or no wish to point a camera at things, can type it. Keep it short enough to type from across a pew.
• Brief one person to help. A sidesperson who can walk somebody through the first scan after a service does more than any amount of artwork. This is practical, not pastoral: the first successful scan is the barrier, and after it people manage alone.

If the dynamic route is the right one

Then treat it as the PCC treats the photocopier contract: a named running cost, minuted, with the renewal in the parish calendar and the account owned by the parish office email rather than any one person’s login. Treasurers hand over; the code should not notice.

On ours, the free plan is three codes, which covers a giving code, one for the newsletter signup and a spare, and Starter is £3.49 a month including VAT beyond that. If the subscription ever lapses, codes already printed carry on resolving, which matters precisely because of the lifespan this page started with. That is not the industry norm, and it is the question to put to any provider before the noticeboard card goes up: each vendor’s cancellation terms, in their own words, are here. Anyone can open an account, but payments are not switched on yet, so this page is not collecting anything either.

Before anything goes to the printer, the print guide has the numbers, and the proof should be scanned on the actual noticeboard, in the porch light it will live under.