Pushpay seeks further growth into Catholic churches, nonprofits and schools

Pushpay

Molly Matthews will take over as CEO of Redmond-based Pushpay during a time of growth and transformation.

The 10-year-old company helps churches collect donations and engage congregants.

According to Matthews, Pushpay’s software saw heavy engagement this past year with Covid-19 forcing many churches to cease or limit in-person gatherings.

As of Sept. 30, the company had 10,896 customers and 441 employees, but Pushpay is seeking further growth into Catholic churches, nonprofits and schools.

“We are not going to win if we are just looking at what the needs of today are,” Matthews said.

Matthews will officially become CEO on March 1, replacing interim CEO Bruce Gordon.

The Business Journal spoke with Matthews about her background and long-term goals for Pushpay.

What are Pushpay’s plans for expansion?

We serve schools, ministries and nonprofits.

It’s a small amount of our customer base today. It is absolutely part of our medium and long-term growth strategy to excel in those markets.

One of the things that has helped Pushpay to have the success that we’ve had is staying really focused on our target market.

We feel like there’s still so much room for us to grow in the church space.

The first growth move that we’re making heading into our new fiscal year, which begins in April, is serving the Catholic faith sector more heavily.

We do have several Catholic parishes and even an archdiocese that we work with, but our desire is to serve that community of Catholic parishes, diocese and archdiocese really well.

What are your plans for the company when you take over as CEO in March?

We’ve always been a growth-focused company from our inception. It’s been threaded throughout who we are.

We do that in a couple of different ways.

We are always looking to expand the product suite that we offer our customers and our prospective customers. That is something we will continue to do throughout this year. It’s the initiative that we’re heavily focusing in.

We feel very strongly that it takes immense focus in one or two areas in order to win in those areas.

We really try as a company to not divert our energy into too many things because you tend to not make enough progress to really win in any space.

We’ll continue to serve nondenominational (churches) and really go heavy into serving our Catholic parishes, diocese and archdiocese heading into this year and next year.

We’ll begin to research and dive deeper into those nonprofit and education spaces for our middle-term and longer-term growth strategy.

How has the business changed during the pandemic?

Our customers have had to move massive organizations and weekend gatherings to this fully digital space.

As you can imagine, it looked different for everybody.

For those churches and organizations who had already been doing some online things, it was … a smoother shift to going fully digital. For others, they had to jump on that learning curve really quickly. Continue reading

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