St Michael’s Stinsford
Ben Widdows
CEO
St Michael’s Stinsford is a Church of England parish in Dorset. The village is small, but the church is sustained by a committed worshipping community. For many such churches, contactless donations feel like something they can’t afford, but St Michaels have proven that the investment pays dividends.
The church sits in an area with limited mobile connectivity and no signal can penetrate the thick stone walls, again some churches might consider this a lost cause, but at Stinsford they have shown that with the right solution these kind of blockers can be easily fixed.
Since installing a Donation Station Pro, the church has raised almost £3,500 in a single year through contactless giving. That figure represents around 13.6% of the church’s total annual income and 68% of giving, which for a small congregation, is a massive contribution.
£3,500
raised per annum
63%
of donations are Gift Aided
4 months
to achieve ROI
The connectivity challenge
I spoke with Chris Gotel, who manages the church’s contactless giving alongside the treasurer, who was candid about the need for the offline solution.
“Without the GWD offline functionality, contactless donations would be unviable in our church.”
There is 4G signal just outside the building, so Chris uses a phone hotspot near the door to upload donations every fortnight, and that has worked well. His advice for any church in a similar position is to “make sure more than one person knows how to do the upload. If I can’t be there for any reason, then I need someone to stand in and keep the donations flowing”.
“Without the GWD offline functionality, contactless donations would be unviable in our church. We were both surprised and pleased by how successful it’s been”.
– Chris Gotel, St Michael’s Stinsford
How the device is used
The Donation Station Pro is used for giving at Sunday services, but also picks up donations from midweek visitors. Church fairs and similar events have proved a particularly good fit: people attending community events often have a card to hand and no cash, and a well-placed device catches casual visitor giving that would otherwise be lost.
Throughout the year a gentle flow of visitors make a pilgrimage to Hardy’s grave and to look at the associations between the writer and poet and his local church. A spike comes every other year when the Thomas Hardy Society have their International Conference and numbers increase but there are a number of events including the Annual Michaelmas Fayre that generate funds, mostly by way of a card not cash.
Many of these visitors do not carry cash, so the device captures donations from visitors the church would otherwise have no way of reaching.
The numbers
In 2025, the device raised £3,412, around 13% of the church’s total annual giving. Chris recently reviewed the performance with the treasurer.
“We were both surprised and pleased by how successful it’s been”.
By using the optimised GWD Gift Aid feature, around 63% of their donations have been gift aided, which is a significant boost. They also take advantage of the GWD-PGS integration, which means the Gift Aid reclaim happens automatically.
Finding the formula
The situation at St Michaels will be familiar to many rural Church of England churches: small community, patchy connectivity, limited volunteer capacity. The assumption can be that contactless giving is not worth pursuing or that they can only warrant an entry-level solution, but he numbers here suggest otherwise.
The question for any church looking to increase giving is not whether it is big enough or well-connected enough for contactless. It is a question of how to deploy the technology in the most effective way and overcome any barriers to giving. GWD can help with both.
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