Here are some hightlights:

• Online giving spikes during the month of December.
• December donors have a three-year cumulative value. That’s 51.8% higher than donors in the other 11 months.
• The online donor experience seems to have a significant impact on donor loyalty, retention, and gift levels. The more intimate and emotionally coherent the giving experience online, the stronger the relationship between donor and nonprofit appears to be. In other words, online fundraising is all about relationships.
• About one in 10 donors…give automated regular gifts. Monthly giving is the most common frequency.

I would encourage you take the time to download and read through the study. The reading part won’t take you long. What I hope you do is block off a day to discuss is how your church will respond to the data and conclusions represented in this research.

Online giving is less about being cool as it is being responsive to the habits of the person in the pew. Ignore this information and you will help fund other organizations.

Churches deal with this reality in various ways. Some keep a separate “summer reserve” account in addition to their “rainy day” fund to maintain cash flow when the contribution line graph usually takes a steep decline for at least six weeks. Others plan their expenses to occur in the Spring and Fall in anticipation of the summer decline.

Whatever “dance” you have devised to manage the summer slump, here are three suggestions you might want to consider before summer arrives:

1. Leverage e-mail communication. Make sure you have everyone’s current e-mail address. (Good rule of thumb: update every 30-90 days.) It easy to keep people connected through e-mail. And research shows that even millennial donors prefer e-mail to every other communication platform when receiving information from organizations like churches. Don’t forget about video-mail which allows you to add a personal touch to your message.

2. Promote online giving. It may be a little late for a full-blown campaign to increase participation in your church’s online giving options, but it never hurts to remind people it’s available. Chances are they didn’t hear you the last time you mentioned it. (Good rule of thumb: About the time you’re tired of hearing yourself say it, that’s when the person in the pew begins to listen.) Using auto-giving options such as auto-debits or bank drafts keeps cash coming even if the members aren’t present.

3. Upgrade your Facebook presence. Since several hundred million people around the globe use this platform, your church might want to consider investing some time and people into building a social media presence through Facebook. Share crazy videos from church camp, link to your Worship services, and keep the stories of life change coming. Facebook has an amazing way of keeping people connected even though there is no direct or immediate personal interaction or dialogue. Don’t miss out on the benefits of building community even when your members aren’t there on Sunday.

Summer is coming. You can’t change that. What steps will you take today to ensure your church is fully funded throughout the entire year?

Have you tried something to overcome the summer slump and it worked (or failed miserably and you can laugh about it now)? I’d love to hear about it.

“Relevance doesn’t just happen. The thing that just happens is irrelevance.”

- Jeff Brooks

The greatest obstacle church leaders have to funding budgets and raising money is that they assume that what is important to them is important to everyone else. Church leaders are often so close to the situation it’s impossible to have any objective perspective. They live with a sense of urgency because they know all the details and fail to acknowledge that the people in the pew are busy and will quickly forget whatever appeals were made Sunday morning by the time they finish lunch that same afternoon.

If you’re honest (and bold) enough to admit that your direct appeals from the pulpit aren’t getting the results in the offering plate that you’d like see, take 22:03 and listen how Jeff Brooks unpacks the incredibly successful Haiti relief funding appeals from people who largely lived with little connection to this country and were largely not personally affected by this natural disaster.

Are you relevant? Wait. Don’t answer that question yourself. Remember to ask the person in the pew.

Pretty simple, huh? You’d be surprised how many churches have online giving and NONE of their members know about. (Seriously! I’ve been to these churches.)

It’s hard for church leaders to remember that most people only interact with their church once every seven days in 59 minute segments.

People forget.

So get creative and consistent in telling people to give online.

Note: If you don’t want people to give online, why are you reading this blog?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtXkZslE0CE]

To view or download the article, click here.

If you are a church business administrator or function in a similar capacity, I would strongly recommend you joining this organization.

This is a vital part of the new “normal” when it comes to charitable giving. (That includes giving to churches.)

“Over the next couple years, fundraising and advocacy will start to move online, and … traditional mechanisms are sadly starting to die,” Green says. He says “we’re at the beginning” of new techniques with “huge potential.”

Donors decide when, how, and how much.

No longer is it acceptable to have a “one-size-fits-all” approach to church giving.

Will your church adapt or will you ignore the shift and help fund another organization or cause…OUTSIDE the church?

I’d love to see you there!

What would you do if your church budget had 20%, 30% or 40% more funds?

Come learn how to increase your giving capacity…expand your ministry opportunity…and maximize your Kingdom impact!

A two-hour workshop for pastors, ministry staff, & stewardship/finance committees to:

• Inform (the changing rules of church funding) and
• Implement (the framework for a specific plan to increase giving for your church)

Six Opportunities to Attend!

Monday, April 26
7 p.m. – Ridgewood Baptist Church, Forrest City

Tuesday, April 27
10 a.m. – Arkansas Baptist Convention Building, Little Rock
7 p.m. – First Baptist Church, Camden

Wednesday, April 28
1 p.m. – East Side Baptist Church, Mountain Home

Thursday, April 29
10 a.m. – Arkansas Baptist Convention Building, Little Rock
7 p.m. – First Baptist Church, Russellville

No registration fee!
A Ministry of the Cooperative Program.

For more information contact:

Leadership & Worship Team
Arkansas Baptist State Convention
Denny Wright
800.838.2272 ext. 5114
501.376.4791
csmith@absc.org

Yep. It’s unavoidable. Sorry. (Don’t like it. GO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO DO!)

If we have to talk about money…and you do…

(go on..practice saying “it”…that’s right…m-o-n-e-y…it’s really not that scary…really)

then we better make sure we get a few things right.

I like what Jeff Brooks had to say in What it takes to be a fundraising writer.

Let me rewrite his ideas in the context of church. When you talk about money, remember these three things:

• Talk about money from the perspective of the person in the PEW, not the person in the PULPIT.
  
• Forget about what YOU need. It’s not about you. It never was. It never will be.
• Get over your inhibitions related to money and acknowledge they are YOUR problem.

Start talking about money. We have Kingdom impact to fund!

To help, I have Lauren Hunter with ChurchTechToday.com, Steve Caton with Church Community Builder, and Tom Roepke a really innovative church leader who has experience in institutional fund development and currently serves in a local church setting. This is a six part series. Each Monday, I’ll post a new podcast capturing our discussion. I will also post a brief outline so that you can quickly preview what will be discussed.

I hope you are as blessed by this series as much as the four of us were in the process of creating it.

Here is the outline of our FINAL conversation:

Focus: Church funding begins with capturing the heart of an individual, not the dollar. Anyone can get a few dollars for just about anything. When we are talking about cultivating generosity, the soil in which this behavior grows is that of commitment. Without an emotional connection and an expressed commitment, sustainable, sacrificial giving doesn’t happen.

Key ideas:

1. Multiple giving options make it easy for people to give.

2. Communication of impact leads to more frequent and larger gifts.

3. Managing giving patterns could reveal a ministry opportunity.

4. Fully assimilated members tend to serve in leadership, be consistent givers, consistently participate in activities and events, and carry an overall positive and satisfied story into the community.

Listen or download the final podcast of this series.

Previous podcasts in this series:

1. Lifecycle of church membership

2. Connection creates community

3. Community facilitates interaction

4. Interaction leads to engagement

5. Engagement fosters commitment

Bill Seaver has been encouraging me to test this platform and see if it would be an effective way to communicate with my readers. His advice has proven to be invaluable to me in the past, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I took some existing content and assembled into a book format. Then, I contracted with a local Web designer who I’ve worked with for years and loaded it on Issuu.com and Box.net. That was Monday afternoon, March 22.

What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.

By the time I got up Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., I already had nearly 100 alerts in my inbox. Thinking someone had hacked my account and sent out a crazy direct message about how much money I made selling tissue paper (or something) on Google, I rushed to open my laptop and see what had happened.

I realized that Ed Stetzer had endorsed the e-book about 12:30 a.m that morning. By 4:10 a.m., more than 200 people had already read or downloaded the e-book. Then, Ron Edmondson published an interview with me later that morning. Those two posts along with a series of Tweets and Facebook updates from countless other church leaders sent off a chain reaction that took this experiment “viral” in every sense of the word.

To date, more than 800 people have read or downloaded the e-book. The number continues to grow daily.

I continue to receive notes that tell me how much it challenged them to think differently and offered a vocabulary and process to what they already intuitively knew as well as notes that said it was the encouragement they were looking for to continue to “press on.”

Kerry Bural from also featured the e-book in the post “Same Old, Same Old” just doesn’t cut it.

I’m grateful to everyone who mentioned the e-book in a Tweet, Facebook update, blog post, e-mail, etc., and I’m indebted to those who took the time to download or read the e-book online. I pray that it was helpful to you in your ministry.

I’m humbled I get to do this for a living.

God is good. All the time.