If you’ve been following along, you’ve now got your target amount you need to raise and a long contact list.  If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably overwhelmed.  That’s good.  This post is intended to help you get from overwhelmed to the beginning stages of organized by focusing on processing your contacts (before you start cold-calling) and then laying out a time-phased plan for making contact with your contacts.

Processing Your Contacts
What you likely have right now is a long list of everyone you know.  If you’re good, you’re still adding to it and if you’re good, it’s a long list.  In order to start making the task of contacting all of these people reasonable, you need to process your contacts.  One way to do this is to add some categories.  If you’re a good little nerd like me, your list is in Excel.  If you’re an extra special little nerd, you’ve already got a column for last name and a separate column for first name so that you can sort your contacts alphabetically.

The problem with sorting them alphabetically is that it doesn’t really help you.  What is helpful at this point is to categorize all of your contacts in two ways.  First is a sub-group type.  For each contact in your list, assign that person to a “sub-group type” (like Family, friends, co-workers, current church, past church #1, past church #2, college friends, etc).  By creating a category column in your contact spreadsheet, you can quickly sort all of your contacts by a grouping that makes sense to you.

The second category to add is “contact type.”  Here is where you begin to think about how you will contact this person.  As a general rule, it is always best to meet someone in person.  It shows that you respect them, that you respect their time, and that they’re important enough to get some of your time and attention.  As you look across your list, however, you’ll realize that meeting every single person is impossible and and in some case infeasible.  By categorizing your contacts into contact types, you’ll be able to start discerning how you’ll make contact with a set grouping of people.  Some examples of contact types are as follows:

• Local and personal – these are people that live in your area that you can easily meet with.
• Local and non-personal – these are people that live in your area but for some reason, it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Distant and personal – these are people that live distantly, but regardless of the distance between you, it still makes sense to meet with them.
• Distant and non-personal – these are people that live distantly and it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Local Church/Organization – local churches or organizations that you will want to meet with.
• Distant Church/Organization – churches not close by that you will want to be in contact with.

The above are just suggestions.  They are, in fact, the categories I used as I processed through my contacts.

In a later post, we’ll explore architecting a plan for contacting each of these contact groups.  Before moving on though, let me just add a few more general thoughts.

1. It is still always best to meet someone in person.
2. If someone is a high potential giver and they live 15 hours away, it may be worth your time and money and effort to buy a plane ticket and go sit down and talk with them.
3. While my friend Bob says that “letters are what 14-year olds send when they want to go to summer camp,” sometimes you’re going to be making contact via mail.  This should be the exception and it should be more than a letter.  We’ll explore that in a later post as well.
4. Be realistic.  Know your schedule and the amount of time you can commit to this.  Don’t sacrifice your family at the expense of raising support.
5. Prioritize your contacts.  This sounds awful, I know, but when the rubber meets the road, you’ve got to know which contacts are most important to contact and why.  I won’t elaborate here, but I will encourage you to prioritize your high potential givers.  High potential being defined as either someone very likely to give or (regardless of their likelihood to give) someone who has the potential to give significantly.  This may be another column in your spreadsheet, or it may be something you do with color-coding.

When To Start
Now.  Chances are if you’ve read through this much information on fundraising, you’re in a spot where you need to start now.  We started about a year out from when we intended to quit my full time job and move to where we’re planting.  As I write this, we’re in the middle of that year and thus in the middle of fundraising.  As you start to think about when to start, remember that getting a couple of strategic partners behind you ought to be your first priority.  After that, start knocking out the people you’ve listed out in your individual/organizational list (see earlier post here).

At this point it is also important to review your time-phased budget (see earlier post here).  One thing I did that has been immeasurably helpful in keeping a status of how we’re doing versus how we need to be doing is to lay in some rows in my time-phased budget for projected (or target or estimated) fundraising income for each month.  The result is a spreadsheet that has both my time-phased budget (an estimate of how much will be spent each month) and my time-phased fundraising estimate (an estimate of how much money will be coming in each month).

This let me toss around some numbers and start looking at how much I needed and when and how that was going to flow into and drive my fundraising.  For example, if you’re planning to quit your job on December 31st and your first big check isn’t going to hit until February 1st, you’ve got a problem.  Obviously all you’re doing at this point is estimating, but what the time-phased estimates allow you to do is fundraise in advance to the amounts needed so that when big expenses hit (like startup costs), you’re covered.

The other thing I’ll encourage you to do while you’re in your spreadsheet is to make additional rows for actuals.  As money starts coming in (and going out), feed the actuals in and compare them to your estimates.  These rows will also then allow you to track your cash flow (amount raised vs. amount spent) over time.

Hold Your Horses

By now you’re either chomping at the bit or throwing in the towel (or calling your old college roomate who seemed to get personal pleasure from spending hours in Microsoft Excel).  If you’ve still got your towel, chomp on it in addition to the bit as there are a few more things to cover before you turn yourself loose.  In the next post, we’ll look at some of the logistics of fundraising and in the one after that, we’ll look at architecting an overall fundraising plan.

Once you’ve determined how much money you need to raise and by when, it’s time to move on to figuring how where this money is going to come from (in other words, who is going to support this thing?).

For us, I tried to think in three basic categories of support: Strategic Partners, Individuals and Organizations, and finally the Launch Team.

Strategic Partners
Going into planting, my hope for anyone reading this is that you’ve got one or two strategic partners.  What I mean by a strategic partner is a church or an organization or a denomination that will come behind you early-on with some significant, committed, financial support.  What I’m talking about specifically is a church that will say to you, “we will give you $20k in December” or a denomination that will say “we will give you $1000/mo starting in January.”  In other words, they stick their neck out there early-on with definitive, committed support when you’re at $0.

I found this to be essential in getting some momentum behind us moving forward.  For us, coming from a background of no denominational support, we were blessed with early relationships with two churches in the Acts 29 Network: Coram Deo and Summit Community Church.  What sets these two churches apart from others that will be supporting us is a) their early commitments to financial support and b) their commitment to coaching, mentoring, and pastoring me through this process.

Locking these guys down and getting numbers and dates out of them will help you get over that first hump of “who is going to support this thing.”  It will also give you something to sit on other than $0 when you start meeting with individuals and other organizations.

Individuals and Organizations
This category is the “everyone you know” category.  If you’re going to raise support for your plant, you’re going to have to dig in and get to work.  When I was soliciting advice in this regard, Bob Thune (planter and pastor of Coram Deo) laid it out like this for me:

It’s always a numbers game. You have to contact 10 people to get 3 appointments to get one solid supporter. This is true whether you’re talking ministry fundraising or whether you’re in sales. Don’t overspiritualize it by assuming that because God is sovereign and you’re raising funds for ministry, it will be way easier than that. Sometimes you can beat the averages, but as a general rule, you need 10 times as many contacts as you need supporters. So if you need to raise $5000 a month and you figure $50 a month is about what an average supporter might give, you need 100 supporters, and 1000 contacts.

I’ll admit that I didn’t believe him when he first expounded this to me.  I’ll also admit that I now believe him.

To get started in this category, just start making a list.  I started mine in Microsoft Excel and as I added names, I tried also to add as much contact information (phone, email, address, etc) as possible.  Add everyone you know.  This will feel odd at first and it will take some time.  Pray over the list.  Pray for God to continually draw up names to add to the list.  When you’re driving in your car and a name pops in your head, jot it down (keeping your eyes on the road of course) and add it to your system later.  When you’re walking the hall at work and you bump into an old colleague that you haven’t seen for a year, jot it down.

If you don’t know all of their contact information, or if you know you cannot contact them right now (say, because they’re your co-workers and they’re not really privy yet to the fact that you’ll be quitting your job in 6 months), add them anyway.  You can always prioritize and add contact info later.  The point right now is to get as long of a list as you can.

Here are some categories to start thinking in:

• Friends
• Family
• Co-workers
• College classmates
• Old college professors
• Everyone from your current church
• People who used to go to your current church but no longer do
• Everyone from your previous church(es)
• Nearby churches (big and small)
• Christian businessmen in your area
• Neighbors (current and past)
• Christian schools and colleges and seminaries in your area

In addition to the above, ask others for additional contacts.  At some point you’ll realize that you don’t know enough people.  The way to keep moving forward is to start asking your contacts (especially the ones who support you) for their contacts.  Ask other church planters who supported them.  Ask them if there is anyone that supported them that no longer is.  Ask them if there is anyone who might be interested in supporting you as an extension for how they supported them.  Ask people in your church for names of strong Christian businessmen.  As them for names of generous friends they have that aren’t a part of your current church.  Ask Christians that you work with that don’t go to your church how you can get in contact with their church.

The point here again is simply to amass as big of a list as you can.  Even if you don’t think that person will support you, put them down.  To date, we have received more support from unlikely sources than likely sources.  God works in mysterious ways.

Launch Team
The final category for support is the launch team.  This is the group of charter members who will dedicate their time, energy, and resources to helping get your church off the ground.  Take a swag at what you think that will look like size-wise and drop an estimated amount based on that.  For example, if you foresee a launch team of 40 givers giving $200/month, tally that across two years and you’re at $192k.  If you got committed folks who aren’t all broke college kids, that’s probably not a bad estimate.  Realize, of course, that some will give more than that and others will give less.  At some point in the launch team formation process, you’ll then need to make clear that part of being a part of a new church plant is to commit to it.  Both with time and resources.

Pulling it Together
Breaking up the “who” into three parts helps you to focus more clearly on where you’re at and where you’re going.  It is key to get the Strategic Partner relationships established as early-on as possible.  It is also important to get down on paper a solid estimate for the launch team.  Add those two together and subtract that number from the total you need to raise to find out how much work you’ve got ahead of you in the Individual/Organizational category.

Next Up:
You know how much you need to raise, you know when you need it by, and you’ve got a massive list of contacts…now what?