A Mission Page That Tells Churches to Ask for the Receipts

Most church partner pages are a brochure.

A photo. A paragraph. A donate button.

The For Churches page I built for Don and Patti Nichols does something different. It hands a pastor working tools, and it tells the missions committee to check the math before it votes.

The line on the page reads: "Ask for the receipts."

What a church actually gets

The page lays out five ways to partner, each with a price on it: sponsor a missionary at $1,200, fill a trunk, host a hygiene-kit day, pray for seven days, or invite Don to speak. All of that is on the churches page.

Then it gives the church things to print.

A poster tool where you type your church's name, the date and the time, and it renders an 8½ by 11 poster with a QR code that scans back to the mission. The tool page says it runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere or saved.

Seven-day prayer cards. A hygiene-kit planner that sizes the shopping list to however many kits the church will make.

And a block of bulletin text with a copy button.

That one sentence is the difference between a website and software.

A website states your numbers. Software keeps them true everywhere they show up.

I checked the math

So I did what the page says to do. I asked for the receipts.

I pulled every per-item price from the churches page, the sponsor page, the shop, and the trip cost page this morning.

They match on every page that shows them. A Bible is $2.50. A hygiene kit is $3. Reading glasses are $0.60 a pair. A trunk is $25 and it costs $200 to fly as checked baggage. A missionary is $1,200, which the cost page breaks into $800 airfare and $400 lodging.

Per-item mission supply prices, US dollars

Source: Don and Patti Nichols, What a Mission Trip Costs ↗

Look at the last bar. Getting a trunk to Belize costs eight times what the trunk costs. The cost page says it plainly: getting the supplies there costs considerably more than most of the supplies themselves.

A church reading that before it votes knows exactly what its money moves.

Where it drifts

Now the part I have to disclose, because it is my build.

The prices hold. The hygiene kit's contents do not.

The churches page, the FAQ and Behind the Mission all list a hair tie in the kit. The sponsor page and the shop list the same kit without it.

It is a hair tie. Nobody was misled about a dollar.

But it is the whole lesson in one small item. What is wired to one source stays true. What gets typed by hand, page by page, drifts.

Two lines that say what the site will not claim

The FAQ on the churches page does one more thing I want every client to copy.

Asked whether there is a cost to have Don speak, it says the site makes no claim about fees or availability on his behalf.

Asked whether a church's gift is tax-deductible, it says those details are being finalized and until then the site makes no claim about deductibility.

That is accountability written into the page. It does not guess to close a gift. It says what it does not know yet.

Do this with your own business

Make a list of every place your price appears. Website, quote form, social posts, the flyer at the counter, the text your office sends.

Next to each one, write whether it pulls from one source or somebody typed it.

Every typed one is a hair tie waiting to happen. Some day it is a price.

The Open Book is where Don and Patti show recorded gifts and expenses. The churches page just points people to it.