Five Key Steps Towards Giving Success
Taking these five steps will guarantee that your giving will go up. The first step is to,
Engage your staff in offering planning. One simple way to do this is to build into your staff meeting time for generosity planning. Every staff member needs to know the status of giving each week. Engage them in planning and implementing all your offering pushes, and you will see your offering rise. Your staff is incredibly creative. Tap into that creativity to improve your offerings. To do this, you next need to,
Elevate your offerings. The offering is the least valued time of our services. To increase giving, you must elevate your offerings to prominence in your services! To accomplish this, you must convince your staff to give the offering time in the service. Worship time is valuable and often fought over.
Is giving an act of worship? Of course, it is. Then why do we typically devalue it by shoving it into the corners of our worship time? By devaluing the offering time, we have devalued the act of worshipping through our gifts. You will see your giving increase when you elevate your offerings to a place of prominence in your worship services. Of all my strategies, this is the easiest to implement yet the hardest to accomplish. Elevating the offering will improve your giving if you,
Energize your offerings. How do you turn boring offerings into meaningful, worshipful, AND energized giving moments? You need to energize your offerings with stories. Gone are the days when we can assume that our attendees know why they should give. Your offering time needs to make a case for why people should give. In my view, one of the best ways to accomplish this is by telling the stories of life change that your church is experiencing. You want your attendees to see that their gifts make a difference.
This is one reason I began advocating setting up the offering time with stories years ago. Your church is doing amazing work, and sharing that story will energize your offerings. That will increase giving.
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Passing the proverbial plate is still a key to full funding in this 21st century. We need to,
Electrify your offerings. Americans have moved away from checks and cash to electronic commerce. If you are going to increase giving, you must electrify your offerings. Commerce has changed so vastly in these last few years, driven largely by the explosion of smart devices.
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Americans love options when it comes to how they pay their bills and how they make purchases. A wise church offers multiple options for giving. Providing multiple options makes it easier for people to give, which in turn increases giving. This leads to my final point that to increase giving; you need to,
Expand your offerings. If Sunday morning is the only time you take up the offering, you might be in trouble. Smart charities and non-profits don’t put all their eggs in one basket. I advise using multiple tools and sources to improve giving in my plans. Even with the proliferation of online giving, the most money charities raise comes through good old-fashioned snail mail. From online to social media posts to direct mail to the physical offering each weekend, multiple options help you achieve your budget goals.
One reason why you must do this lies in the fact that church attendance patterns have changed. Back in the day, most, if not all, active members were in attendance on a typical Sunday. It was easier to communicate with them, and the standard offering plate was all we needed. Now your active members are attending church less often. Our challenge is in how to stay engaged with them.
I advise my clients to use multiple platforms to communicate their message, as they know many miss the weekend announcement time. They also work to push members to sign up for automated giving. A robust online giving platform and strategy around that platform are essential to meeting this new change in attendance patterns.
All of the above takes commitment and work. A good analogy is a farmer. He must sow to reap, yet if he doesn’t continually tend his fields, there won’t be a harvest. When harvest time comes, he can’t simply lay around in bed, hoping the crops get in the barn. From beginning to end, to reap a harvest, he must work. The same is true for you and your staff. The labor you put in today will dictate where you end up. These five Es for the offering will forever change the offering time at your church and will increase by giving and givers.
Mark Brooks – The Stewardship Coach
