So I recently found I am able to make electronic donations to the LDS church for my tithing.
I have decided to make my donations through United Way.
The reason I do this is because United Way allows me to donate to the non-profit (the LDS church) my full amount of tithing. Any other charges incurred are taken care of by my employer, (Intel). 100% of the donation goes to The Church funds, all fees and overhead for United Way are paid from an endowment grant Intel and other companies have made.
Intel then matches the amount that I donate up to $10,000. The portion that Intel matches is given to the local community.
The way I found out how to do billpay: I sent in this form: United Way donations Be Warned: below is comment stating some forms are outdated.
You only need to fill out below “Donor Information”
I found a more generic form online that seems to be more fitting: Generic Electronic Donation Form Be Warned: below is comment stating some forms are outdated.
I filled it out, made it into a pdf and emailed it to donations@lds.org
Once I did that,
a week later
I got an email confirming my information has been recorded.
Here is the email:
<BEGIN_EMAIL>
Thank you for submitting the Bill Payment form. You are now ready to make use of the bill-payment services offered by your financial institution. Be sure to use your membership number as your payee account number. Additionally, Please call or email our office a few days after you initiate your first donation to verify that it has posted correctly to your account. As a reminder the complete electronic donation instructions are included below, please follow them exactly to avoid any errors in posting your donations. Thanks.
LDS Donations
801-240-2554
donations@ldschurch.org
Electronic Donations to Church Headquarters Through Bill Payment Service
Donations through bill payment services can be accepted for: Tithing, General Fast Offerings, General Missionary Fund (no Ward Missionary option is available through bill pay), Book of Mormon Fund, PEF (Perpetual Education Fund), and “Other” (the General Humanitarian Aid Fund). Bill payment donations cannot accommodate requests to send funds to a ward for fast offerings or missionary support. If you wish to give to your local fast offering or ward missionary fund you will need to give the donationdirectly to your ward.
In order for your donations to correctly post to your desired categories at church headquarters you must set up separate bill payments for each category to which you wish to donate. For example, if you would like to make a tithing donation and a donation for the General Missionary Fund, you must setup a bill-payment instruction named “LDS-Tithing” and a separate one named “LDS-Missionary (General)” on your banks’ bill payment system. The EXACT category names must be used and are case sensitive. Shown below are the exact names that must be used for the various donation categories:
LDS-Tithing
LDS-Fast Offering
LDS-Missionary (General)
LDS-Book of Mormon
LDS-PEF
LDS-Other
As part of setting up your bill pay instruction, your bank will ask you to input your account number with the party to whom you are making the payment. This account number is your church membership number. You can get your membership number from your ward clerk or it can be found on your temple recommend. Please input your membership number in this format: ###–####–#### all leading zeros and dashes are necessary.
During the bill pay set up, your bank will also ask for the address and telephone number of the church. Please use the following address for all of the donations categories listed above:
Please input this address EXACTLY as it shows here:
50 East North Temple Street
Room 1521
Salt Lake City, UT 84150
Phone: 801-240-2554
The bill payment service cannot send your donation to the Church electronically unless the category name and address for the church are identical to those listed above. It is also critical that your membership number is entered as the bill pay account number exactly as described above.
Monthly confirmations will be mailed to allow you to verify that your donation was received and allocated correctly. Tax valid receipts will also be mailed after each year end. Please contact our office if you have any additional questions.
<END_EMAIL>
Funny thing is my donations for United Way don’t start until December. So I was wondering what to do in the mean time.
I went on to my Wellsfargo and LDS-tithing is confirmed on their site. Type this in and click go.
This shows up on the next page:
So on the next page you enter your account number to be submitted with it. This account number will be your LDS Membership # as instructed by the directions in the form that you should have emailed to Salt Lake.
You can take it from here.
Please don’t hesitate to ask me any more questions.
see some details here:
http://ldsclerks.com/index.php?title=Donations_to_Church_Headquarters
Part of the reason this works for tithing specifically is because tithing goes into a general church fund anyway. When I pay with check to the ward level they send it to the General Church fund. This is not the case for other donation offerings, such as fast offerings. Fast offerings are applied to a smaller regional level whether it be stake or ward level.
Please comment and correct anything I have stated incorrectly. I will then update the post. Thanks