Sponsorship
Your church pays nothing — the site is funded by sponsors instead. Here's exactly how that works, and why it means your website costs your church £0.
Running a proper website — built once and kept current every week — costs £20 a month, whole site included. Your church never pays that. It's covered by sponsors instead, through one shared pot, so the figure your church sees is always the same: nothing.
Your church pays
Funded by sponsors — church members, local businesses and fundraisers — so there's nothing for your treasurer or PCC to approve.
Every sponsor — whatever they give, and however often — pays into one shared pot rather than paying for a specific church directly. Each week, that pot is checked and allocated: every £20 a month of support in the pot funds one more church website, kept live and updated for as long as the sponsorship behind it continues.
Sponsors can be members of your own congregation who want to give something practical back, a local business that would like the goodwill and a mention, or money raised through a church fundraiser — a coffee morning, a fete stall, a retiring collection — put towards keeping the website going instead of a one-off cost. Some churches cover the full £20 a month themselves through a fundraiser; others rely entirely on outside sponsors; most fall somewhere in between. Either way, the church itself is never billed.
There's a single way this works now, rather than a choice of tiers: every sponsored site gets a weekly update round. Send through whatever's happened during the week — notices, events, news, photos — and it's built and published on a weekly cycle, no separate rounds or pricing to think about. See Keeping Your Site Current for the full detail on how sending an update actually works.
Every sponsored site carries a simple "Supported by" credit, crediting the businesses, fundraisers or individuals whose contributions keep it running (an individual sponsor can also choose to stay anonymous). A sponsor doesn't get any say over what goes on your church's site — that's still entirely between you and me, based on what your church actually wants. Sponsorship funds the site; it doesn't come with editorial control.
This isn't a donation to a charity, and JW Church Websites isn't a registered charity — so there's no Gift Aid attached to a sponsor's contribution.
The same principle from before still applies: a benefice or group of parishes sharing one site is still one website, not several, so it's funded the same way as a single church — one sponsored site, whatever the church count. See Groups & Benefices for the full detail.
If the sponsorship funding a particular site drops away, the site doesn't disappear overnight — it stays live for a period while new sponsors are found or the church looks at other options, and I'll always talk it through with you directly rather than simply switching anything off.
If you run a local business, you're part of a church congregation, or you'd simply like to help keep a church's website going, get in touch and I'll explain exactly where your contribution would go and which churches are waiting on support.
Completely free for your church — funded by sponsors, weekly updates included.
Get in touch