GIVING COMMUNICATION

                        WHAT IS YOUR CHURCH'S GIVING EXPERIENCE?

 

            For the past three weeks, we’ve talked about effective giving communication, including revisiting the mission of the church, thanking people and looking at your people.

            Here’s a list to go through, looking at the list and comparing it with your church’s giving experience:

1.    Is your giving page easy to find, easy to use and easy to understand? Someone who isn’t familiar with it should be able to find it and use it with only a couple of clicks.

2.    Remind people about giving. Many may have every intention of giving (online or in person) and then forget. Announce it in person, announce it in the chats online. And that leads us to the next one.

3.    Include the various ways to give. Remember, giving is an act of worship so give them that opportunity to worship. Would you deprive them of singing, reading scripture, or hearing the message? Of course not! Don’t deprive them of the opportunity to be generous. Talk about online giving and how to do it (click, text, QR codes, etc.) Talk about checks and mail (some will still want to do this).

4.    Educate and encourage your givers about the why. Why should they give? What happens when they give? Are lives changed? Are disciples made? Or…? What is the story that will encourage them to want to give?

5.    Personalize your thank yous. Use their name. Don’t just rely on computer-generated letters/statements.

6.    Update your giving page, your articles, your website, your stories. If the story about lives changed is over a couple of years old, does that mean no lives have been changed since? Does it mean that telling the story isn’t important? Or?

7.    Talk about recurring giving (online giving set up so it happens regularly).

What does your giving experience look like?

 

 

            If you wish more information on anything you’ve been reading about, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

 

                                           GIVING COMMUNICATION

                             ANTICIPATING BUT BEING SENSITIVE

 

            For the past two weeks, we’ve talked about effective giving communication, which started with revisiting the mission of the church, and thanking people.

            There are a couple of other thoughts that I wanted to share.

·         Anticipate that many people can afford to give. Of course, there are some that are struggling and cannot give, but there are many that can. Don’t assume that everyone is in the same position. If you’ve done any reading around giving and how it happens, you’ll see the statistic that many churches actually have an increase in giving during a crisis. Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself! The other idea that I want to bring up here is that we often focus on people giving from their current income, which is fine; but many people may have assets from which they can give. This may be what we are ignoring, to our detriment and to the detriment of our people. I will share a thought about planned giving in a couple of weeks.

·         Have you identified who your major givers are? Have you talked to them? What are their reasons for their generosity? What motivates them to give? Are there particular interests that they have or particular needs in your church/context that you could talk to them about?

·         Although my top thought above was about anticipating that people can give, we also have to be sensitive. Noone should fall through the cracks. Many years ago, I talked to someone that I knew slightly from the church. I hadn’t seen them in service for a while and said I had missed seeing them. They indicated that they had had a family setback and had been forced to cut their giving in half. Noone noticed. When no one noticed, they felt that they weren’t important. Of course, someone feeling overlooked doesn’t want to be asked to give. How do we avoid overlooking people? Exclude from your request for financial giving families that you KNOW are suffering from financial difficulties. There may be other ways they can be benevolent.

It continues to be a lot of work, but the benefits will continue to pay off! For the next couple of weeks, I will continue to spend time on how some of this could work and things that we could be doing to change our stewardship focus and our discipleship focus.

 

 

 

            If you wish more information on anything you’ve been reading about, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

 

                                                GIVING COMMUNICATION

                                               THANKING YOUR GIVERS

 

            Last week we started talking about effective giving communication, which started with revisiting the mission of the church. When our focus is on money, we (and our hearers) are uncomfortable. I get giving is money, but generosity is more.

Talking about what your church is doing and how givers can help is far more effective than just asking for enough money to pay the bills.

But we can’t take people for granted. Thank people. We’re asking them to be generous; we need to be grateful as well. Go out of your way to make them feel appreciated.

I think givers are often lucky if there’s a brief paragraph from the finance chair in the bulletin or the newsletter thanking “everyone that gave.” Even the giving statements are essentially receipts and not thankful. Most giving statement shave lots of space. You know that white space on the piece of paper? The statement contains the dates and amounts of gifts; it gives the giver the total. But what if we also talked about how their generosity made a difference. What happened because they gave to the church? What lives were changed? What was the impact? Tell the stories. It’s not going to cost any extra postage to write a few lines telling the story and another line or two thanking people.

Do you remember the last thank you note you received? Was it handwritten? Were you happy to receive it? I don’t know about you but when I receive a thank you note, it means a lot. I probably didn’t give to get it; but it’s wonderful to receive. This could be a task for pastors, or for Finance team members or other leaders in the church. It doesn’t mean telling everyone how much the person gave. We’re thanking them for their gift. It’s that gift, coupled with other gifts, that is making the difference.

·         Thank them

·         Tell them what has been accomplished because of their generosity

·         Sign your name

 

It continues to be a lot of work, but the benefits will continue to pay off! For the next couple of weeks, I will continue to spend time on how some of this could work and things that we could be doing to change our stewardship focus and our discipleship focus.

 

 

 

            If you wish more information on anything you’ve been reading about, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

 

                                              GIVING COMMUNICATION

                                               CHANGING OUR FOCUS

 

            Over the last few weeks of summer, we focused on customizing the approach to discipleship and stewardship based on life stages, spiritual maturity and financial health.

            Lots of ideas, but we struggle in talking about money and giving and generosity in the church, don’t we? When someone approaches us complaining that “all we do is talk about money”, we promise that we only do it during the fall when we “have to.”

            Well, one of the problems with that is we’ve placed the focus squarely on the money, which shouldn’t even be the real point of the whole stewardship/discipleship story!  I know Jesus talked about money more than anything else in his stories and parables, but it wasn’t because money was the point, but because he knew how much importance we would place on it.

            What if we changed our focus? I’ve said it before, and I want to say it again, it’s the need of the giver to give, not the need of the church to get that we need to focus on.

·         Too many of our stewardship campaigns (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone else) is focused on what we need to pay for in the upcoming year, i.e. payroll, utilities, paper, technology, etc.

·         AND too many of our discipleship plans and work focus on getting more people on the pews—increase those numbers!

What if instead:

·         For Stewardship:

o   We made some changes in how we focus on what it “costs” to do church?

o   What is it we need to focus on in our particular context?

o   Looked at our church’s mission?

·         For Discipleship:

o   We looked at our church’s mission and who we have and who we don’t have in our disciples?

o   What if we looked at our folks’ spiritual gifts and where they are in their own discipleship?

It seems like a lot of work, and it probably is, but the benefits would be huge! For the next couple of weeks, I will spend time on how some of this could work and things that we could be doing to change our stewardship focus and our discipleship focus.

 

 

 

            If you wish more information on anything you’ve been reading about, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

 

                          STEWARDSHIP AND DISCIPLESHIP TOGETHER

                     TYING IT ALL TOGETHER WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS

 

            Over the last few weeks of summer, we focused on customizing the approach to discipleship[1] based on life stages, spiritual maturity and financial health.

            All of what was discussed in the past few weeks focused on both stewardship and discipleship. One cannot effectively exist without the other. I spent time during these summer weeks to discuss stewardship because many of us will focus on stewardship in the fall. I think it’s important to start some of the lead-up work now. If you read anything about stewardship planning, it all tends to focus on either:

·         Doing stewardship year-round (every month)

·         At the very least, plan and prepare some time in advance

            All of that is important, of course, but I think going through the steps focused on life stages, spiritual maturity and financial health – first, for yourself, to help you understand where you are coming from. This will help you understand others before you approach them.

            The next step would be to go through those same steps for your folks. Who are the more spiritually mature? Financially healthier? You can, and should, approach them far differently than you approach people who aren’t in those same positions.

            Don’t do it all alone. Get a team together and do some work. You may find (and I am sure you will) that time will get away from you, and you won’t be able to do all of this work before you have to start “doing” stewardship. That doesn’t mean that you stop doing the work.

·         Identifying folks that may need some help with financial wellness can help steer you toward a small group.

·         Identifying folks that are still working through the early steps of discipleship may create another small group or need.

·         Identifying folks that are extravagantly generous and spiritually mature may help you form a good team.

            All of this work that I’ve discussed over the past few weeks is important, but what is also important is that “good” stewardship campaigns or “effective” stewardship campaigns require certain things that make them good and effective. Good tools are important for any task; good stewardship tools are the same.

·         Sample Letters

·         Effective and useful Scripture

·         Ideas for offering time

·         Ideas for messages

·         Ideas for “stewardship talks”

            I will be working on pulling together some of these tools, and will be making this available probably this fall. Keep an eye out!

 

            If you wish more information on anything you’ve been reading about, or you’d like to know when resources are available, or would like to discuss stewardship and its relationship with discipleship, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

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[1] Stewardship Education that Builds Disciples, Furlong, Jessica and Dick, Don (Christian Stewardship Network), https://www.christianstewardshipnetwork.com.

 

                   STEWARDSHIP AND DISCIPLESHIP TOGETHER

                                         FINANCIAL HEALTH

 

            Over the last couple of weeks, we focused on customizing the approach to discipleship[1] based on life stages and spiritual maturity. This week we’ll talk about customizing our approach to financial health.

            The article from Christian Stewardship Network lays out four levels of financial health:

·         Struggle

·         Stable

·         Solid

·         Surplus

            Their definitions identify struggling as those in the midst of financial crisis and in need of financial health; stable are those living from paycheck to paycheck; solid are those who have learned the basics of budgeting and are now debt free with margin.; and surplus are those with more resources than needed to basic needs and wants.

            Most likely, you have people in all four of these stages of financial health, just as you have people in all stages of life and all stages of spiritual maturity. People in every stage looks at stewardship; at discipleship, and at life differently. We, therefore, need to approach this differently as well.

            One thing I have learned is not to assume someone is struggling and not ask them to commit, or vice versa. But if you are aware someone is struggling and in the midst of crisis, then we have a responsibility to help them through that. To move from struggling or stable to solid may require teaching and training. A financial program, or how to budget program, or how to get out of debt program would be of great help to many. Anyone can and should budget, not just people with money.

            It is hard to focus on making a financial commitment when someone may be worried about even putting enough food on the table, or to pay their rent. Helping someone out of that stressful situation will go a long way toward helping them care for themselves and to commit to a generosity program. Also, people who are focused too much on money may have great difficulty in even focusing on anything else, even discipleship or worship or prayer.

            Like last week, let’s start with ourselves. Where do you fall in each of these areas? How do you know? What are the things that you can work on for each item. I attended a workshop that included completing a money autobiography that helped me understand why I believe what I do about money, why I spend money or save money. Start with that for yourself. If you’d like a pdf to a money autobiography to start your own work, please let me know. It will help you face your own financial health, but also to help others. A wonderful small group study could start with money autobiographies.

            When we’ve helped our folks care for themselves financially, other steps will fall into place.

 

            If you wish more information on money autobiographies, or would like to discuss stewardship and its relationship with discipleship, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

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[1] Stewardship Education that Builds Disciples, Furlong, Jessica and Dick, Don (Christian Stewardship Network), https://www.christianstewardshipnetwork.com.

 

                           STEWARDSHIP AND DISCIPLESHIP TOGETHER

                                                SPIRITUAL MATURITY

 

            Last week my discussion was focused on customizing the approach to discipleship[1] based on life stages. This week, let’s continue talking about customizing teaching styles for different individual’ life stages. This time we’ll talk about spiritual maturity.

            Last week, we basically talked about age; this week, while it may sound similar, it can be quite different. This week, instead of age, it’ll be spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity isn’t always based on age.

Each of us needs to look at where we are personally, but also where our folks are at. We’ll find that everyone is a little different. Is their spiritual maturity low, medium or high in:

·         Becoming a follower of Jesus

·         Developing a theological foundation with basic practical application

·         Embracing intentional generosity, with a solid, biblical foundation in generosity.

·         Growing in obedience (including planning to pay off debt)

·         Using God’s blessings for kingdom building and relationship

·         Discipling others in stewardship

·         Practicing radical generosity, with a goal of glorifying God.

 

            Looking back over this list can seem daunting. But did you notice that none of those items talked about writing checks or paying bills. Every item was totally focused on biblical foundations, theology, obedience to God, radical generosity. Also, all of it is aimed toward glorifying God, not ourselves.

            I think one of the best ways to start with this list is to start with ourselves. Where do you fall in each of these areas. How do you know? What are the things that you can work on for each item. Once you’ve worked through it for yourself, it will be somewhat easier to create a diagram or picture of what each of those items looks like and how to model it for others, and help others in their own path of spiritual maturity.

            All of this is about stewardship, yes, but also about discipleship. What does it mean for you personally, and what can it mean for your church?

            Next week we’ll continue this conversation about customization.

 

            If you wish more information on this, or would like to discuss stewardship and its relationship with discipleship, please feel free to contact me at (315) 427-3668 or sranousacctg@twcny.rr.com. I’d be happy to help.

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[1] Stewardship Education that Builds Disciples, Furlong, Jessica and Dick, Don (Christian Stewardship Network), https://www.christianstewardshipnetwork.com.