Linda Lysakowski says, “Houses of worship can benefit from the same strategies used by other nonprofit organizations.” The photo above depicts design plans for a Mosque, Synagogue and Church Being Built Together in Abu Dhabi! Now there’s a fundraising project for you! Here’s what America’s Fundraiser has to share about local ministry fundraising:
Organizational Development
You have probably heard the expression, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” For many organizations, this means strategic planning and/or development planning. However, at the core of good fundraising is strong organizational development. You cannot raise money if your internal organization is weak. You need to look at several things: your leadership, your staffing, your volunteer board or councils or committees, your technology, and the ways you currently raise money. The first thing any church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or any other house of worship needs to do is to create a plan for a well-rounded organization and then a development program, encompassing all types of fundraising methods.
Starting organizational development begins with looking at your leadership. Do you have a strong CEO (pastor, rabbi, Imam, etc.) who recognizes that fundraising is part of their job. Yes, faith leaders are, first and foremost, spiritual leaders for their congregations, but being a responsible steward of God’s gifts in the form of time, talent, and treasure is also critical. And, like it or not, there are many donors who will respond better when the leader approaches them for a gift.
Linda Lysakowski Shares Effective Fundraising Strategies for Houses of Worship
You should also look at your entire staff. Everyone in a faith-based organization has a role to play in fundraising. I learned this lesson well in my first development job at a Franciscan university. The faculty and staff that supported the development office made all the difference in the world. They were the people who knew the program best and knew the students better than anyone else. I made it a point to forgo eating lunch in the faculty/staff dining room, choosing instead to have lunch with the students and listen to their stories about their successes and their frustrations. These stories helped me create a compelling case for support. Do you have enough staff, do have the right people in the right seats on the bus? If not, you may need some reorganization of staff.
And volunteers, who are the lifeblood of many in a faith-based organization. Do you have a finance council, an advisory council, and a stewardship council? Are volunteers involved in ministries and in other duties within your place of worship? Without volunteers, your staff will need to assume more roles, including roles that should be delegated to volunteers. And one important point to remember is that volunteers tend to contribute more to the organization for which they spend their volunteer time.
Your place of worship also needs to have a mission, vision, and values. These should be developed during your organizational planning phase. You should also have goals and objectives for the long-term health of your organization: do you need to grow in number of members, expand your facilities, secure your future? What will it take to get you there? The answer will most likely be money!
So, you need to develop a budget for current maintenance of your programs and future growth. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of each of the fundraising methods you might consider and how they differ in faith-based organizations from other nonprofits. Many places of worship differ from other nonprofits in several ways. But most of the principles followed by successful nonprofits in your community will also be true for your place of worship.
Small But Steady Gifts
For place of worships like churches, mosques, synagogues, usually their bread-and-butter giving comes on the form of weekly donation or monthly donations—passing the basket. The fact that most of the charitable giving in the USA goes to religious-based organizations may be due, in part, to the fact that most other nonprofits do not ask people to give weekly, although many do offer monthly giving programs. Electronic giving has become more popular in recent years, and this has a distinct advantage, especially in areas where a lot of members may be “snow birds” or in case of the sunbelt, “sun birds” who head north to escape the 115-degree heat in the summer. Electronic giving has made a huge difference because people make their donation regularly even if they are of town for an entire season. In many cases, those who opt for electronic giving, can ask for a card to put in the basket saying, “I gave electronically.” So, if putting something in the basket is important to your members, check if your electronic giving program has this option.
For most people of faith, they do feel an obligation or a desire to support their local place of worship, and possibly even the regional, national, or international headquarters of their faith. I have noticed, through my homebound ministry, that even when people are homebound and cannot get to church, many of them will give their donation to the homebound ministers who come to give them communion weekly.
Mail, Telephone, and Social Media
Most places of worship do not use these methods on a regular basis, however mail is used by places of worship for special collections, sometimes in support of things like missions, special needs within the place of worship, or perhaps a natural disaster such as the destruction by fires in Maui or California.
Like direct mail, telephone fundraising is rarely used in place of worships of worship; however, it can be effective special appeals as it is more personal than direct mail or email. Both these methods may be used in the “public phase” of major, capital, and planned giving appeals in your place of worship
Social media is an important tool for your place of worship, but don’t rely on it to raise money. It is a great PR tool that can set people’s mind to thinking about fundraising. For example, your place of worship should have a well-done and up-to-date website. You can likely find someone in your congregation to do this for you, but make sure they are capable and experienced, not just an eager volunteer. A Facebook page can be used to promote activities you have held or are planning to hold. If you want to reach the younger generation, tools like TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) will help promote your services and programs. If you don’t have someone internally to manage your social media efforts and do it right, consider hiring an outside person or firm to do this for you.
These tools are also helpful in creating awareness of fundraising activities within your place of worship.
Special Events
Fundraising events are probably the biggest drain on staff, volunteers, and donors any organization can engage in. The usual rate of return on most events is about 50 percent of gross revenue. So, is there a place for events? Yes, in places of worship whose market is their congregation or group of members. Dinners, breakfasts, bazaars, and the like can be great social events in a place of worship because they bring people together to share fellowship. However, don’t rely on these events to raise all the money you need—it just isn’t going to happen.
A big drawback of running too many events is burning out your volunteers. And then, the other consideration is that if you are running a dinner, do volunteers get their meals free? Think about an event that might cost $50 per ticket, and you give a free dinner to twenty volunteers, you just lost $1,000 in revenue from that dinner. As one of my friends who has been a professional fundraiser for many years likes to say, “Did they make more than they ate?” But, think about the hidden costs of your events, such as staff time, volunteer time, the cost of lighting, heating, and air conditioning your facility for the day of the event, and most importantly, the “nickel-and-time effect of donor fatigue.
Grants
Grants are almost never the solution for places of worship unless your place of worship provides community services such as a food pantry, shelter, or other community service.
Major Gifts
As you can see by now, I am trying to get you to think about the one type of fundraising that can make or break your place of worship—major gifts. Please try to shift your focus from events, grants, and social media fundraising onto getting your members to make more significant gifts to help you change the lives of the people you serve.
Endowment
Building an endowment for the future is also critical, you can think of it as a “rainy day” fund for when things go wrong unexpectedly, but it is more effective when you think of it as assuring your future, expanding to serve more people, and growing your programs and technology to meet the needs of your current and future members and the people you serve.
Linda Lysakowski Shares Effective Fundraising Strategies for Houses of Worship was first posted at PAX Global
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