Case Study: The United Church of Canada Foundation achieves streamlined, low-cost monthly giving and local admin empowerment with CiviCRM

Online PAR large monthly giving system

The United Church of Canada Foundation, a large Protestant denomination with thousands of congregations, needed to replace its legacy PAR (Pre-Authorized Remittance) system so local pastoral charges could manage monthly giving across multiple funds using direct debit and credit cards. Key challenges included simplifying the user interface for non-technical local administrators, building two-way synchronization with the legacy system during rollout, and adding support for monthly direct-debit batches and national-to-local direct-credit transactions. To address this, the Foundation engaged CiviCRM and a development team to customize the platform.

CiviCRM was extended to support monthly recurring donations, model the church’s organizational relationships and permissions, provide profiles, searches and reports, automate notifications for transaction errors, and run in parallel with the legacy system via a bespoke two-way sync. The solution centralized low-cost processing while crediting local bank accounts after fees, enabled local administrators to manage their own donors (reducing demands on national staff), and established a foundation for future self-serve donor pages—measurable improvements in local autonomy and operational efficiency driven by CiviCRM.

The United Church of Canada Foundation