Set up your Stewardship Committee. Your Rector or Priest should be included. It might be helpful if your Treasurer OR Finance Committee Chair were also on this committee. This committee will review past budget information, current membership information, any plans for new or expanded programs or projects, etc. to determine the goal for your Fall Campaign. Once the goal is determined, the Committee will plan the series of events that will make up the campaign: letters that ask for a pledge commitment, homilies, testimonials, and a kick off or end of campaign celebration. (The TENS resources, paid for by the Diocese, will provide you with letter templates and bulletin inserts that can be downloaded and customized for your church).
Establish the timeline for your campaign. When will you kick off? When will you end? When will you post stewardship messages on social media? When will your pledge request letters be mailed? When will you insert stewardship messages into the Sunday bulletin? When will you have members give a stewardship testimonial on Sundays? Which services? How and when will you celebrate your successful campaign?
Take a good look at your church website. Changes might need to be made to allow for: online giving, monthly giving, access to the Stewardship Materials like bulletin insert messages, stewardship homilies, and the Pledge Card itself. Take a look at whether these things are easy for folks to find. How long does it take for someone to make an online gift currently? Recent research by fundraising software company Blackbaud says: “Online donations should not take more than 20 to 30 seconds to complete. If someone has to click multiple times, potential donors start dropping out of the gift process.” There is a wonderful program available through TENS called tithe.ly that can boost your online donations, online monthly gifts, and even create an app for cell phones that members can download to their phone to make gifts using a credit or debit card. There is no set- up charge, but each transaction is charged a service fee of 2.9% plus 30 cents. The 2.9% covers the credit card transaction fee, and the 30 cents goes to tithe.ly (a service fee is pretty standard across most major payment gateway services, including PayPal. But the value add for tithe.ly is that they will set up your website portal for you and give you a mobile app.). More information can be found on the TENS website.
Start gathering information and success stories that you can share with the congregation via social media, your church newsletters (print and electronic) and get those messages out BEFORE you ask them for money for the 2021 budget. People will always give more generously if they know their gifts make a difference. How is their pledge helping with outreach or missions? How is their pledge helping with Christian Formation? How is their pledge helping maintain your building and grounds? Tell these stories and say thank you to the congregation for making this Kingdom work possible. Where do you find these stories? Talk to your clergy, your committee chairs, your volunteers, and your Vestry members. The stories don’t have to be amazing. They don’t have to be more than a paragraph long. They just need to tell how God is working in and through your church family.
Blog post written by Brenda Rigdon