Your Church Website's One Job This Fall: Answer the Giving Question

Something changed in the tax code that your donors haven't heard about yet. And your website is the only staff member you have who works at 11 p.m. on December 30.

The question your site will get asked all fall

Starting with the 2026 tax year, people who take the standard deduction can deduct up to $1,000 in cash gifts to qualified organizations — $2,000 for a married couple filing jointly. That's new. For years, the large majority of filers who don't itemize got no tax benefit from writing a check to their church or the food pantry. Now they do, and The NonProfit Times reports the change is expected to pull more small and mid-level donors into annual giving.

That matters because the giving picture underneath it is thin. Giving USA 2026, from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, put total U.S. charitable giving at $617.20 billion in 2025 — a record, and the first year above $600 billion. But individual giving, adjusted for inflation, is essentially flat compared with 2017 and still 15% below its 2021 peak. Individuals accounted for 64% of all giving, down from roughly 80% in the late 1980s.

So there's a real opening here: a concrete reason for a household in Allen County to give before December 31, and almost nobody explaining it in plain English. If your giving page still says "Donate" over a stock photo of cupped hands, you're leaving that on the table.

What to actually build

One page. Not a redesign of everything — one page that does the work, written the way someone in your pews or on your volunteer list would actually ask about it.

That page needs to carry:

• The deduction in two sentences, with the dollar figures and the fact that it applies to cash gifts to qualified organizations
• Your EIN and exact legal name, so a donor's tax software and their accountant both find the right entity
• What receipt they'll get and when — the IRS requires a bank record or a written acknowledgment showing your organization's name, the date, and the amount, and for gifts of $250 or more, an acknowledgment stating whether you gave anything in return
• One giving form, not three, so the donor who came from the bulletin and the donor who came from Facebook land in the same record

That last one fixes a problem you already have. When volunteers, members, and donors live in three separate lists, it's usually because three separate forms created them. One page with one form is the cheapest fix available.

This is what the Website service produces: a spec naming every page and what it has to accomplish, a design direction, page-by-page copy written to that spec, then the live site. The copy is the deliverable that matters here. A two-person staff doesn't have a spare weekend to write a giving page that's accurate about tax law, and the volunteer who "does the website" isn't going to write it either. Generating the draft from a spec and editing it for truth takes an afternoon.

Write it so machines can read it too

One more reason plain sentences beat clever ones right now. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and found that about 18% of Google searches returned an AI summary. When one appeared, users clicked a traditional result only 8% of the time, versus 15% when there was no summary. Pew also found 88% of those summaries cited three or more sources.

Translation for a Lima congregation: when someone asks an AI assistant whether they can deduct a church donation in 2026, something gets quoted. It should be your page. These systems pull from text that states facts directly — headings that ask the question, answers underneath, no marketing voice in between. The same writing that helps a 68-year-old member is the writing that gets your organization named in an AI answer.

Consistency is the first thing to slip when three people are covering nine jobs. A page written once, correctly, doesn't slip.