“Often when finances get tight in a church the first thing cut is the evangelism and advertising budget.”–Rick Warren, from his ministry toolbox
As someone who raises money PRIMARILY for evangelism I had no idea this trend existed. Since many of my regular readers are Campus Crusade staff I sensed this would encourage and depress you at the same time.
Evangelism and advertising can be seen as superflous, or non-essential–operationally speaking. When faced with keeping the lights on or doing an outreach pragmatically I’m assuming Warren means most churches choose to keep the lights on.
My family has recently entered a focused season of support raising. Here’s some of the things we are working on that relate to this article:
- Refining our regular communications to our ministry partners to provide more personal content and more specific ministry content. It can be tempting to crank out communications in the haste of getting things done but a couple extra minutes invested in photo editing, title creating, or text descriptions in an email or letter can make a huge difference. Read a helpful article on writing magnetic titles here.
- Analyzing the numbers behind everything! We use Mailchimp to send our monthly email newsletters (which provides robust analytics including open rate, who opened, click rate, etc), maintain a family blog that has a page dedicated to our ministry (that has google analytics installed to track nearly everything a visitor to our site does), and send out a snail mail letter once a month to everyone who gives to our ministry. The snail mail letter is the only piece of communication that we cannot measure accurately. Setting up google analytics on your ministry website is a MUST!
- I looked at a report today that revealed 21 people provide 50% of our annual support. To treat all of our supporters the same is foolishness and poor stewardship. These 21 people are bought into our ministry on an entirely different level and should be treated differently!
As a steward of these resources that God has provided I want to make sure those that give to our ministry do not experience their giving as superfluous but absolutely critical to the Great Commission.