Invite a church. You both get $25.
Every church here has a referral link, and it belongs to a person rather than to the church. Send it to a pastor you know. When his church actually starts using Shepherding Tools, $25 in credit lands on his account and $25 lands on yours, in the same moment.
Where to find your link
Sign in and look at the top of your People page. Every user has a link, not just administrators, and it sits in a line above your work that reads “Invite another pastor.” Click Copy your link. It’s short enough to read aloud over the phone.
If you administer the billing for your church, Admin then Billing has the same link under a card called Refer a church, alongside how many churches you have invited and what credit you are holding.
Your link carries your name on it. If four men at your church each send invitations, the four of you can tell whose invitation earned what, which is the whole reason the links are personal rather than one per congregation.
What has to happen before the credit is earned
A click does nothing. Neither does a signup on its own, because accounts get created and abandoned the same afternoon, and paying for one of those would be paying for nothing.
Credit is earned once the new church has done three things:
- Verified its email address.
- Imported its congregation, from a spreadsheet or from the software the church already uses.
- Logged its first pastoral contact.
Those are the same three steps the new church sees on its own dashboard. They are one list in the code, checked in one place, so what a pastor is shown and what actually pays cannot drift apart.
None of it needs a card. The free plan covers up to five users with no time limit, so a church can finish all three steps, pay nothing, and still have $25 waiting on the account for the day it outgrows free.
When the money shows up
Usually within the hour. Both churches get an email and a notice in the app, and each one is told who the other is. You did this together. It would be strange to hide that.
The credit comes off your next bill. The Small Church plan is $29 a month, so $25 covers most of a month.
The limits, and these are all of them
A congregation can be invited once. The invited side pays one time per church. There's no cap on the other side, so invite as many churches as you want to.
On a free account, credit is good for 90 days. If you have a paid subscription, the credits you earn do not expire and can be applied to your next subscription renewal.
Closing an account and signing up again doesn't earn a second one. We match on the administrator's email address, and it survives the account being deleted.
Gift codes
Sometimes a church is handed a code directly, with nobody having referred it. A gift code carries its own amount, works once, and is claimed on the signup form. Everything else on this page applies to it the same way.