What Is Sowfund? Tax-Deductible Fundraising for Christian Missionaries

Short answer: Sowfund is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that lets Christian missionaries collect tax-deductible donations without having to become their own nonprofit. Missionaries get a public profile, a personal short link, fundraisers for specific projects, a wallet, and automatic tax receipts for their donors. It's free for missionaries to use, and funds sit with Sowfund until the missionary withdraws them.

The long answer is the rest of this post — and it starts with a group text.

There's a group text somewhere right now with 43 people on it, three of whom are your mom. Someone just asked for your Venmo handle. Someone else asked if it's the same one as last year. A third person swears they sent a check to your parents' old address in 2019 and wants to know if it ever went through.

This is what missionary fundraising looks like for most people. Not a strategy. A scavenger hunt.

And the thing is, nobody meant for it to end up this way. You just needed a way for your people to give. Venmo was already on their phones. GoFundMe had a big "Start a fundraiser" button. Your sending org said "we can process donations for you but it takes 6 weeks and there's a memo line." You duct-taped something together and got to work. Most of us did.

We built Sowfund because missionary fundraising deserved a tool actually made for missionaries — not a peer-to-peer payment app, not a disaster-relief crowdfunding site, and not a workaround.

Most fundraising tools weren't built for missionaries

GoFundMe is built for medical emergencies and disaster relief. Venmo is built for splitting a dinner bill. PayPal was built to buy things on eBay in 2003. None of them were designed for the specific shape of support-raising: a person called to long-term ministry, a base of recurring supporters, donors who want their giving to be tax-deductible, and a sending org that needs some paper trail to make the whole thing legit.

Here's what that mismatch looks like in practice:

• Your donors can't deduct their gifts on their taxes. A Venmo transfer to your personal account isn't a charitable contribution. Neither is a GoFundMe donation, unless it's routed through a specific certified charity partner. For the person writing a $200 monthly check, that matters. A lot.
• Recurring giving is an afterthought. Most of these tools treat monthly gifts as a workaround, not a first-class feature. Which is backwards, because recurring support is the whole point.
• There's no real record of who gave what. Try finding, in Venmo, every person who gave you money between January and December. Go ahead, I'll wait.
• Your supporters get zero help. When your mom forgets she signed up for monthly giving and wants to cancel, who does she call? You. Always you.

None of this is a moral failing. It's just that these tools weren't built for you. You're trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver. It kind of works, but your wrist is tired.

Tax-deductible giving, without becoming your own 501(c)(3)

This is probably the biggest single reason Sowfund exists.

Sowfund is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. When someone donates through your Sowfund profile, the gift is made to Sowfund and specifically allocated for your ministry. That means — for your US-based donors — every donation is tax-deductible. They get an automatic receipt by email the moment they give, and a year-end statement in January for their taxes. You don't have to do anything.

This is a feature almost no personal fundraising platform can offer, because becoming a 501(c)(3) yourself is a serious legal undertaking: incorporation, board, bylaws, IRS Form 1023, ongoing compliance, annual filings. Most missionaries don't want to become their own nonprofit — they want to do the work they were sent to do. So we became the 501(c)(3), and you get to use it.

Two quick clarifications, because we get these questions a lot:

• Funds aren't taxable to you until you withdraw them. They sit with Sowfund on your behalf. This is meaningful for tax planning and for the peace of mind of knowing the money is held by a nonprofit, not stacking up as personal income.
• Tax-deductibility is a US thing. Donors anywhere in the world can give to your Sowfund, but only US donors get a deduction under US tax law. Which is still a big deal: a missionary serving in Kenya or Peru can receive support from US donors and give those donors a valid receipt. Most personal fundraising tools can't do that.

Free for you. Sustained by a small service fee.

Let's get the money stuff out of the way, because it matters and nobody likes platforms that bury this.

• Missionaries pay nothing. No subscription, no card on file, no "pro tier." You never enter payment details to use Sowfund.
• Donors pay nothing either — they just make their gift.
• Sowfund takes a 5% service fee from each donation. That's what keeps the platform running and every feature free for you.
• Payment processing is separate — card is 2.2% + $0.30, ACH/e-check is 0.8% (capped at $5), AMEX is 3.5%. Those are the standard rates our payment processor charges, passed through with no markup.
• Donors can cover the fees at checkout, and about 85% do. When they do, you receive the full gift amount.

That's it. No withdrawal fees. No minimum to get started. No catch. Full numbers live on our platform fees page if you want to nerd out.

One profile. Your whole support-raising story.

When you get approved, you get a public profile page automatically. No setup, no "launch checklist," no 12-step wizard. It's live. You can add your story, where you're serving, your ministry focus, photos, social links, and a custom thank-you message that appears after someone donates.

Your profile lives at sow.fund/yourname — a short, memorable link you can actually say out loud at your commissioning service without anyone needing to write it down. The slug defaults to your name, and you can change it from your profile settings anytime.

A few other things your profile does that are genuinely useful:

• QR code. Every profile has a built-in QR code — tap the three-dot menu on your public page and choose "QR Code." Put it on a slide at church, on the back of a prayer card, on a coffee-table flyer at your sending event. People scan it, land directly on your profile, and give.
• Recommended donation amounts. Set your own suggested amounts for one-time and monthly gifts. Different missionaries have different asks, and generic "$25, $50, $100" buttons don't fit everyone.
• Encourage recurring. If you turn this on, when a donor tries to give a one-time gift between $30 and $200, Sowfund gently suggests a smaller monthly amount instead. Because you already know monthly supporters are worth ten times what one-off gifts are.

Fundraisers for specific trips and projects

Your profile is your long-term home. But sometimes you need to raise for something specific — a short-term trip, a vehicle, a project, a medical fund, a language-school semester. That's what Sowfund fundraisers are for.

Each fundraiser has its own public page with a progress bar, a goal, an end date, and a live feed of recent gifts. Donors can give one-time or monthly. If the fundraiser hits its goal early or you close it out, recurring gifts automatically stop. The funds sit with Sowfund until the fundraiser closes, then get released into your wallet all at once — no piecemeal payouts to reconcile.

You can run a fundraiser alongside your main profile. They cross-link automatically: your profile shows your active fundraisers, and your fundraiser pages link back to your profile. Two doors into the same house.

Where the money lands, and how you get it

Everything you've received lives in your wallet. You can see each donation, each fee breakdown, each donor note, and the estimated arrival date for any pending gift. Fundraiser donations live in their own tab so they don't muddy the numbers.

Withdrawals are simple: enter an amount, enter a quick note for your own records about what the funds are for, and confirm. Money lands in the bank account you connected during onboarding. No withdrawal fees. The only rule is a $100 minimum per withdrawal — enough to make the transfer worth doing, low enough that you're not waiting months to access your money.

And because we know you're going to get the "how do I cancel my monthly giving" question from a supporter eventually, we built a donor portal. Your people can go to sowfund.org/manage-donations, see their giving history, and cancel any recurring gifts themselves. You are no longer the customer-support department for your own support team.

Who Sowfund is for

Sowfund is for Christian missionaries raising personal support — full-time, part-time, pre-field, on-field, long-term, short-term. If you've been sent in some form, this is for you. We don't take sides on denomination or tradition. Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, non-denominational, Orthodox, Pentecostal — you're welcome here, and your donors are welcome to give.

The only real gates are geography and identity verification. Sowfund is available to missionaries from a specific list of countries (see supported countries for the current list), and during onboarding you'll complete an application plus identity and bank verification through Stripe — the same payment processor that handles the checkout at most of the online stores you already use. Once that's done, you're in.

Getting started takes about as long as setting up a new email account. The application review typically comes back within 72 hours. You can sign up at sowfund.org and be live on the platform within a few days.

You were sent to do ministry. The spreadsheet, the three payment apps, the P.O. box, the group text with your mom on it — none of that is the ministry. It's the scaffolding, and it's supposed to make the real work easier, not harder.

That's the whole idea behind Sowfund. Less scaffolding, more sending.