UMCMarket Gets Upgrade and Re-launches

Shopping portal www.umcmarket.org gets new look

The General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA) announced this summer that the online shopping portal, UMCMarket, has relaunched using more advanced technology and faster delivery of donations. Working with Tribute, Inc. the re-launched UMCMarket will provide an enhanced user experience, quicker access to status reports, regular distribution of micro-donations and the addition of hundreds of savings offers for participants.

Doug Spear, Tribute President, said “We are very excited to support GCFA’s vision for church members to have the ability to make micro-donations that benefit United Methodist church ministries. Tribute’s product platform is ideally suited to enable and enhance UMCmarket.org, and we look forward to providing a program that benefits the ministry of local churches.”

Moses Kumar, top executive for GCFA said “When we launched UMCMarket in 2012, we were confident that the people of the Church who shop online would support and utilize it as an innovative way to raise funds for the ministries of local United Methodist churches. We have collaboratively worked with Tribute on this program that will help local churches make a difference in their communities with the funds that are raised.”

With the new program, each church or ministry will start with a new account. All donations generated prior to July 13, 2015 on the previous platform will be paid out before the end of 2015. GCFA will begin working immediately on issuing checks to the various ministries until each church or ministry is paid their total amount due from the previous provider.

The look of the new site for micro-donations has changed, but the foundational functionality and benefits remain the same – United Methodists who shop the thousands of retailers available can generate donations to support their local churches. Existing users will sign up to establish an account with the new provider and designate the ministry they choose to support. All users will be able to watch an overview video and review frequently asked questions prior to signing up. An online marketing toolkit is provided at www.umcmarket.org/inform to help participating churches communicate the opportunity to their ministries,
which includes how-to videos, PowerPoint slides and bulletin inserts.

For more information, contact the Shared Services Department at GCFA at sharedservices@gcfa.org.