DAVID ADAMS finds a crowd-funding site made to help Christians live out the “heartbeat of God”…
The use of crowd-funding sites for the raising of money – whether it’s for a band’s new album, to help someone with medical bills or even so someone could make a potato salad (yes, that really happened) – have become an accepted way to raise money for a cause or a project that otherwise couldn’t get off the ground. The focus of US-based site GiveSendGo, a crowd-funding site designed specially for Christians, is to provide a mechanism for believers to support the ministry or mission of other believers as they take the hope and love of Christ out into the world. “GiveSendGo.com is a unique social crowdfunding platform for those living out the heartbeat of God,” write its creators. “We believe that everyone from Christian business owners, missions organisations, churches, artists, missionaries, and individual Christians were created by God with a mission in mind.” Like other crowd-funding sites, it’s a pretty simple process – creating a ‘campaign page’ in which you describe the project you’re wanting to fund, sharing it with family and friends and then waiting as the funds do (or don’t) roll in. Current projects waiting to be supported on the site include helping someone attend a training program for worship leaders, funding mission trips to Israel, Brazil and India, and helping a Peruvian non-profit put in an elevated water tank to provide fresh water for the children it supports. GiveSendGo offers its services for free, although donations are welcome and some processing fees which go to a third party do apply. Certainly worth considering next time you have a project to fund.