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January 31, 2008
5 Steps to becoming a better fundraiser
We reviewed 5 necessary steps to increase church giving in my conclusion of the The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing series. You may think that Fundraising is someone else's problem. But the best fundraisers are those who are most passionate about their cause.
If we aren't passionate enough about the message of the Gospel and the effectiveness of the Church to assist in fulfilling the Great Comission to inspire people to give their time, money and talents, then something is terribly wrong.
Fundraising becomes a natural step for humans to take once their hearts and minds have committed to a goal, cause, impact and/or message. As church leaders we have the responsibility to proclaim the Gospel passionately so to inspire others to find themselves changed forever--including their understanding of money, giving and stewardship.
If we don't do it, someone else will. And the Church will suffer for it.
Read the entire "The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing" series:
The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing, an Introduction
The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing (continued)
The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing (Part 3)
The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing (Part 4)
The Pulpit vs. The Pew on Tithing, in Conclusion
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January 30, 2008
Fundraising trends affecting churches
Trends are just that: trends. They help us made some assumptions and assist in our decision making. They are not absolutes. They are not infalliable. They are just a collection of data and observations that form the basis of some general conclusions.
With that being said, trends also allow us to process a lot of information at a 50,000 foot perspective. As church giving overall is declining, church leaders are beginning to be more intentional about fundraising and financial matters. They recognize that it will take money, time and talents to operate the organizational structure of the Church. It will take money to buy Bibles and go on mission trips. It will take money to meet the physical, mental and economic needs of the community. And without those funds, the Church becomes paralyzed.
One of the trends impacting Christian giving and fundraising that I find most interesting is the inverse relationship between the overall decline in church giving and the increase in people, organizations, training, etc. that have surfaced who are uniquely geared toward helping churches and church members to recover a Biblical understanding of money, giving and stewardship.
As church leaders, what places do you go to or have gone to in the past that have proven to be the most helpful in the area of fundraising?
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January 29, 2008
Is fundraising even Christian?
Perhaps you're one of the people who read yesterday's post What makes Christian fundraising different? on Tim Smith's book Donors are People Too and said to yourself, "Fundraising is somebody else's job. It's not a ministry requirement."
I think there are many pastors and church leaders who believe that fundraising is a four-letter word that is forbidden from the Christian's vocabulary. It feels dirty. And it's more dreaded than the getting all your teeth pulled at the same time.
In my conversations with some pastors, they tell me that fundraising isn't something a minister should be concerned with. The money needed will be provided for "by the work of the Spirit." That sounds like a very holy, theological response. Unfortunately, it's the equivalent of a CEO of a company saying the customers who buy his company's product/service need the CEO and his/her company more than the company and CEO need their customers. That's simply not true.
I'm not diminishing the role of the Holy Spirit in the work of the church. It's central to our effectiveness in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. But when we take that reality and use that as an "out" or excuse as to why we're not responsible, we mis-use theology to justify our own interests. (Not that that's ever happened before.)
Fundraising is a responsibility of the the Church as an organization. If there is no money for ministry, then there is no ministry. The Church has operational needs, and ministry costs money. So Fundraising is not just Christian, it's at least in the top 5 things that every church and church leader should be concerned with.
What makes fundraising Christian is not the act itself. Rather, it's the goal we are trying to achieve. If all we are trying to accomplish is more money for the sake of more money, bigger salaries, etc., then we miss the point. If we are attempting to fund the ministry that God has placed on our hearts so that we can reach the world for Christ and carry out the Great Commission, then we are precisely on target.
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January 28, 2008
Donors are people too
One of the things I like to do when I travel is catch up on books that I really want to read but don't seem to have the time to. (Can you relate?) Donors Are People Too was on the top of the pile of books sitting at the edge of my desk.
This small book highlights the necessary function of relationships in cultivating donations from your donor base. I think we all "know" this in the back of our minds. But fundraising becomes a very objective, stale process if all we focus on are spreadsheets and goal boards.
If we remember that donations are a measurable behavior of an internal, emotional commitment of a human being to a cause in which they personally believe in and/or indentify with, then we can reason the most important function of any donor campaign is relationships.
In my sales trainings I learned that people buy from who they know, like and trust. I think the same is true with fundraising; people give to people who represent causes they know, like and trust.
The author also points out that when you connect with people emotionally within the context of a long-term relationship, the donor tends to give more money that just a "one off" type donation. For the fundraiser (i.e. anyone involved in any non-profit--including churches) the primary goal is to help people find a place to connect and a person to identify with. When that happens, donoations come naturally.
We know this is true particularly in church life because those who feel most connected to the community of faith are the ones who most likely give the most and the most consistently over time.
One book down.......an unlimited number to go!
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January 24, 2008
Free Article on Church Budgeting
Don't know where to begin when it comes to church budgeting? Click here to read an article that covers the basics. Let's call it "Church Budgeting 101."
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January 23, 2008
Budget Resources
Here are some great, inexpensive resources to assist you in the church budgeting process. These practical guides were put together by the SDA--people who are professional coaches to church leaders all over the country in the area of church financial matters.
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January 22, 2008
Budget Time
For those churches who've adopted a fiscal year that matches the calendar year, you're new budget just went into effect. Or if you're like most churches, you're still working hard to put together and approve the current year's budget before February 1.
Since the church budgeting process is fresh on your mind, I'm curious what that process looks like in your church:
(1) Is everything left to the finance committee or business administrator?
(2) Does each individual ministry have an opportunity to request funds in the new budget?
(3) How do you know what to allocate the funds for?
(4) Who is involved in the decision making process?
(5) ??--What did I miss?
Send me your (war) stories.
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January 21, 2008
Staggering statistics
Poverty: More than 1 billion people live in absolute poverty. This includes 700 million people living in slums, 500 million people on the verge of starvation, 93 million beggars, and 200 million children exploited for labor.
Minimal Wages: 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest populations must survive on $1 a day.
And we are worried in America about how we will be able to afford the latest and greatest of anything........I mean everything.
From Generous Giving
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January 16, 2008
Wanted: Church Management Professionals
Churches are becoming more sophisticated in their structure and operational behavior. In fact, most larger churches are hiring skilled business professionals from the secular world to do what they do in the church world.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, I think this is a good step. We need this skill set. And it's rarely found in just one person (the pastor). This individual helps to round out the necessary business leadership to effectively and efficiently operate the ministry to its potential while the pastor has the ability to do what he does best--shepherd his people.
To help prepare these church business leaders, Villanova School of Business has developed a Masters of Science in Church Management degree. It's designed to mix business and church management theory to prepare people for positions such as Business Administrator and Executive Pastor.
If we agree that this is a good thing, how do we make a person who would complete this degree available to the small church? Even though the issues are not as complex, making sound organizational and business decisions is just as essential to ministry impact in smaller churches as it is in larger churches.
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January 15, 2008
Overcoming Your Church's Financial Crisis
June 18 was the first Sunday Brother Randy Smith noticed the offerings starting to drop. As the church treasurer, the decline in offerings did not seem like a big deal, but now, a month later, it was becoming more difficult to pay the church bills. Brother Randy did not want to do anything to harm the recent church growth of young believers. However, if something did not change, the church would not be able to pay its bills.
Read the rest of the story here.
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January 14, 2008
When did stewardship become a negative word?
Communication is a fascinating subject. Deconstructing how we create a message, send a message and receive a message is a complex process. I'm also very interested in how words, specific words carry with them a perception that colors not only the message but the messenger.
Let's take stewardship for an example. Most of the people I talk to about stewardship have great hesitations on the subject. They have visions of someone beating the pulpit and demanding a tithe. Somewhere along the way the word stewardship evolved into something negative--a subject no one wanted to deal with or talk about or even discuss. And if you did speak of the subject you were considered old, outdated and definitely "uncool."
If I'm honest, I've thought the same things myself. But there is a larger reality that I think most people miss: No Money. No Ministry.
Stewardship is the life-blood of all that we do. It's the oil that keeps the machines runnings. It's the resource we use to supply the needs of the ministry we have been called to do.
That being the case, how can we begin to "re-seed" the story of Biblical stewardship so that it becomes more of a holistic approach to the Christian life and less an irregular fund-raising and capital campaign program?
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January 9, 2008
Simple solution to an economic situation
There is a simple solution to resolve the weakening affect of the US dollar overseas and how it's impacting the lives of our SBC missionaries. (Click here it to read yesterday's post.)
1. Tell the story of what's going on. Yesterday was the first time I had heard about the situation. Why is that?
2. Implement a one-time, denomination-wide "fill in the gap" special offering. Should we sit and wait for the next Lottie?
3. Dedicate 100% the money raised from this one-time special offering to go directly to our SBC missionaries to offset the declining value of the US dollar. Imagine how it would feel to be an SBC missionary living abroad who received an unexpected check in the mail along with a note that said "thinking of you."
Of course, why do we have to wait for someone else to act? Why not do it ourselves?
What if SBC churches started a grassroots campaign that educated the people in the pew on the situation and raised the dollars necessary to support the advancement of the Kingdom around the world?
If that happened, I think we would all be surprised at the outcome and outpouring of generosity from people giving to other people to advance the Gospel message and fulfill the Great Commission.
After all, isn't that what it's about anyway?
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January 8, 2008
Weak dollar overseas impacts lives of missionaries
I rarely cite the same source two posts in a row. But this one was so compelling that I had to write about it. Again, the source of the post comes from the Think Christian blog. Only, Andy Rau, content administrator for gospelnet.com, writes the post for today.
He highlights an article from USA Today that explains how the decreasing value of the American dollar overseas is impacting the lifestyles of missionaries. The USA today article quotes an SBC missionary who explains that she can't afford to mail items back to the States and even struggles with the ability to purchase milk and bread.
This is a real economic problem. And it bothers me that this isn't being talked about more. While we sit surrounded with the comforts of our lives in the US debating the substance and future of cooperative missions, one of "our own" sits on the frontline in the mission field trying to keep herself alive given the fact that the dollars we send her are not only decreasing in quantity but buying power as well. (Note: This is not a crticisim of the IMB. They are doing a great job. This is about economics and how the value of a dollar is shifting how far a dollar can stretch.)
Our distinction as a denomination has always been our ability to cooperatively work together to support the advancement of the kingdom through missions and ministry both in the US and all over the world. We won't be able to continue to do that if we can't offer the ability of our missionaries to sustain themselves with life's basic necessities.
Does this bother anyone else? Any ideas on how to overcome this economic obstacle to ensure that our missionaries can worry about Kingdom concerns instead of life's baisc necessities?
I'm not interested in political statements. I'm looking for practical solutions to an economic problem.
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Is online giving a growing trend?
A friend e-mailed me a post he read on Think Christian - a blog that attempts to address the collision between faith and everyday life. This particular post is about online giving. David's thoughts have also incited a good bit of discussion representing a variety of positions.
It's worth taking a few minutes to read through.
If you're not already thinking about online giving and how this cultural trend IS ALREADY impacting church stewardship and giving, you're behind. So catch up!
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January 7, 2008
The results of online giving are in...
I found this post very interesting. It analyzed 70 non-profits to evaluate the overall effectiveness of their online giving strategies. The prevailing theory is this: online giving will increase donations and overall effectiveness at raising the funds necessary to support the operational needs of the organization.
Here is a piece of what the survey revealed in the area of retention:
The groups we surveyed retained 70% of their online monthly donors in their first year, but retention rate dropped to 52% the second year.
On average, 12% of online monthly donors missed at least one monthly payment in two years.
People's behavior appears to be the same--whether donations are electronic or via paper. So for the average non-profit (or in our case the church), is online giving the "magic bullet" that will yeild a more consistent stream of income and increase giving, or is it simply another medium for people to choose from?
You decide.
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January 2, 2008
Function Precedes Form
Don Campell is the Director of Stewardship for the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. He can be reached via phone at 1.804.672.2100 or via e-mail. After visiting with Don in his office one afternoon, he told me about his theory of "function precedes form" and how that impacts our strategic approach to stewardship and giving. I asked him to expand on that idea. Below is his response.
Imagine my disappointment when, as a young boy in my elementary school shop class, I discovered that you couldn’t just pick up wood and create something. It was a hard lesson to learn that I had to sit down, draw my ‘ship’ and then carefully print my plans for building it step by step. Later in high-school I hit the same snag when in Algebra I had to learn ‘how’ to arrive at the correct answers. I could figure the problems out but when I couldn’t demonstrate how I got to the correct conclusion I had to listen to my teacher’s counsel.
Through many years of formal education and working through many tasks those lessons from my early education have rung true time after time. An important part of stewardship development for the Baptist General Association of Virginia is writing and speaking with many about the need of going back to basics in the area of Stewardship Education and practices.
In architecture it is my understanding that "function precedes form." Knowing the function of an organization will inform the architect who will then go to the drafting board to design a building that will address the issue of function. The problem in much stewardship education over the years is that we have been designing programs (buildings) without considering the total picture (function) of stewardship addressed in the scriptures.
Douglas John Hall sees man as a steward from the onset of creation. Indeed the Genesis account of man’s placement in Eden’s blessed environment record’s his creator’s conferring responsibility on him for caring for all that we was being given. If this pattern is accepted then it means that the whole of man’s stewarding responsibilities have been wrongfully boiled down to tossing “coins in the coffer” not to build a cathedral but many times to make up for a shortfall or fix a leaking church roof.
It is as if stewardship has been compressed to a convenient, non-threatening brass container that is rubbed (gently) when things and money gets tight. Stewardship has been held captive, in too many churches, by the "tyranny of the urgent."
Hall’s thesis in Imaging God is that man is the image of God. As the image of our God we are to reflect what kind of a God we serve. A God concerned for sinful ancestors, a God concerned for a brother’s killer, a God concerned for wailing prophets and ailing mother’s in law. We have a God who gave everything and asks very little in return.
A steward is a metaphor, the image of his creator. As human stewards of all that our Lord provides we are to be as caring for creation as our Lord was. We are to be as loving in our living as our Lord was. We are to be as giving in our spiritual living as our Lord was. As the voluntarily connected children of the living God we are to be as committed to missions as our Redeemer was.
Someday the Lord will return after travelling on a “long journey” and he will summon a grand meeting of all living stewards. The tragedy for some will be that they will have lived with a misunderstood and imperfect view of stewardship as an annual response to urgent need fund-raising.
Back to basics is to go back to the book of beginnings (Genesis) and relearn the original assignment to mankind to be stewards, caring and tending for God’s creation. Real stewarding grows out of obedience, is strengthened by faithfulness and becomes motivating by the love of God recognized in a believing steward.
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January 1, 2008
Happy New Year!
Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! May the blessings of God Almighty go with you in 2008.
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