Archive for June 11, 2009
Church Plant Fundraising: Architecting [Plan]
Summary So Far
Alright, if you’ve been following along in this series on fundraising, you’ve thought through how much you need to raise and your timeline, you’ve thought through who you’ll be fundraising amongst, you’ve processed through how exactly you’ll be contacting folks and when, and you’ve thought through most of the logistical questions associated with fundraising.
Preparation vs. Plan
I’ve been calling everything up to this point “preparation.” You’re now ready to craft your specific plan. What differentiates the prep from the plan is that your plan is executable. Preparation knocks out all of the things you have to do in order to execute your plan and thus it is important to spend ample time processing through it all. When you’re ready to plan, it’s time to think more poignantly through architecting exactly what you’re going to be doing as the fundraisor.
The goal of a well-architected plan is to let the plan guide your work. With a good plan in place, you should never have to ask yourself, “what should I be doing.” A good plan will continuously answer that question for you. In architecting your plan, ask yourself these questions:
- How will I initiate contact?
- When will we meet?
- What information will I convey to them?
- How can they respond?
- How will I follow-up?
- What happens when they respond or commit?
What follows is the process that I’m using right now. This is primarily focused at the level of personal contact with people. At this stage in our fundraising process, I’m focusing nearly 100% on people that I can meet face to face. There will come a time and place for doing some additional mail-only fundraising, but the plan that shakes out of that will basically be a similar subset of what I lay out here. Also, please note that this has evolved since I’ve started and I’m sure it will continue to evolve. Something that I recently added per the recommendation of a friend was the initiation letter – prior to that I was simply cold-calling folks. Even though the cold-calls were somewhat effective for me, I like the initiation letter better especially as I begin to make contact with people whom I haven’t been in regular contact with for some time.
The Initiation Letter
The first thing I do in order to establish contact with someone is to send them a short letter. This is basically a heads up. In the letter, I share briefly a little about what is going on in my family’s life and share briefly about what God is calling us to (some of the people I contact won’t know). I then make it clear that I’m assembling a prayer and financial support team and let them know that I’ll be calling them in the next week or so to try to arrange a time when we can meet and talk more about them becoming a part of that team.
Right now, I send out about four of these per week.
The First Call
Roughly one week after I’ve mailed someone an initiation letter, I then call them to schedule a meeting with them the following week. (I also send out four more initiation letters to four new people so that these things are all overlapping and creating a pipeline of weeks in which I’ll be meeting with folks). The first call has proven to be one of the harder things to do – largely because it’s just flat out hard to get a hold of people sometimes. Be persistent here. Keep track of when you tried to call someone and jot a note to yourself of the day and time that you did actually get a hold of them for a higher likelihood of success if you have to contact them again in the future.
I usually try to keep the phone call brief and save most of what I have to say for the meeting itself. One thing to note regarding the scheduling of the meeting: accommodate them. One reality you have to get used to as a fundraisor is to be flexible and realize that in some way, you’re a bit of an intrusion into their “normal” life. Typically, I’ll try to provide multiple times of the day that work for me (breakfast, lunch, coffee after work, dinner, after dinner, etc) and let them identify which works best for them and then lock down a day, time, and place.
The Meeting
I always try to get to where we’re meeting 5-10 minutes before we’re actually supposed to meet. This shows that you respect their time, that this is important to you, and that you’ve got your act together. In the meeting I try to share about my calling, a little about the importance of church planting, answer the “why Lincoln” question, and share our timeline. I’ve found that it is pretty clean to transition from the timeline, to fundraising, to the status of fundraising, and then to asking them to prayerfully consider supporting us.
I then give them one of our fundraising booklets which includes a commitment card and a self-addressed envelope. I explain that I’d love for them to go home, pray about it, and then respond via the card indicating a commitment to support us in prayer and/or finances.
The Booklet and Commitment Card
One of the things that God has continually used in our fundraising process is a fundraising booklet. This is a booklet that I put together with some advice of others and includes basically a very brief view of our mission and vision, a bit about Lincoln and the need for a gospel-centered, missionally-focused church there in the city, a little about me and my background, as well as our timeline and fundraising information. I spent some time and money on this to make it good and really use it to put in people’s hands so they have something they can take home and look through that contains most of the stuff that I try to hit on in the meeting itself. You can take a look at our fundraising booklet by clicking on the 2PC Fundraising Booklet link under “Publications”. (Note: it looks a little funny when you open it because it’s all set up to print out double-sided and then be folded and stapled).
Along with the booklet, I include a commitment card and a self-addressed envelope that comes back to me. The commitment card is a way for them to indicate how they would like to commit to Project 2 Pillars. Here’s the 2PC Commitment Card that we’re currently using.
Finally, I let them know that they can respond and commit by returning the card and if I don’t hear from them in a few weeks, I let them know that I’ll follow up. I then go home and write them a thank-you for meeting with me and get it mailed out to them as soon as I can reminding them that I’ll be following up if I don’t hear from them.
Following Up
Once you’ve met with someone, chances are that you’ll have to follow-up. I’ve had a few folks that have gone ahead and filled out a Commitment Card and send it back but by in large, it’s taken a follow-up call to get someone to actually commit. After I meet with someone, I give them two to three weeks to respond on their own and if I don’t hear from them, I follow-up with a phone call to see if they have any questions for me and then specifically ask if they’ve made a decision to support us (in either prayer or financial support). Many times, I’ll find that despite the fact that this is the most important thing going on in my life right now, it shakes its way down their list of things to think about (that’s reality). What that means is that they may need some more time to think and pray about it. If that is the case, I ask them if it would be okay if I call back in a couple more weeks to see where they’re at with that. If they’re willing to make a commitment over the phone, I typically ask them to go ahead and fill out the commitment card and send it in as well.
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that some people are going to say yes and some people are going to say no. That’s part of it. Some people have legitimate reasons and they want to give them to you and some people don’t. The fact is that as a church planter, God has called you to ask. The people that he intends to support you will and the people that he does not intend to support you will say no. Don’t take it personal. God is good and he will provide everything that you need in this (not to be confused with everything you want).
One other thing before moving on: be diligent about following up. If you say you’ll follow up in two weeks, follow up in two weeks. Be organized and stay on top of it.
When They Commit
Once someone makes a commitment, be ready to handle it. This goes back to having everything in place from the preparation work. When I receive a commitment from someone, the first thing I do is add them to our monthly email list. This is a list that I use to send out happenings, funding status, and specific ways for folks to pray for us. Whether they’re supporting via prayer, finances, or both, they get added to this list.
The second thing I do if they’ve committed to financial support is send them a Support Packet. The purpose of this packet is to give people a wider view of the financial side of this project by:
- Providing information regarding how they can continue to support Project 2 Pillars.
- Explaining the overall funding picture for Project 2 Pillars.
- Explaining how their money is being used.
- Providing our plan to becoming self-sustaining.
- Providing our philosophy of being a church that plants churches that plants churches that plant churches…and how their support of Project 2 Pillars multiplies in an exponential manner in the Kingdom of God.
- Explaining how financial accountability is being achieved.
If you’re a church planter and are interested in seeing a copy of this Support Packet, contact me via the “Contact Project 2 Pillars” link and I’ll send a copy over.
The Support Packet also includes giving instructions and a first-time giving envelope. If they’re going to be monthly supporters, they are informed that they’ll receive a letter each month acknowledging their previous month’s contribution along with a giving envelope for the following month.
The last thing you’ve got to do is come up with a system for tracking everything. As I mentioned before, I have the luxury of one of our partnering churches handling a lot of this for us and then sending reports to me. I then feed those into a spreadsheet (of course) to keep track of everything. I also feed it back into my original spreadsheet which laid out the projected fundraising per month. Explaining how all of that works would be a little tedious, but make sure you spend some time thinking through how you’ll keep track of everything and stay on top of it.
Concluding Thoughts
Tired yet? I am. Fundraising is a hard process. I’ll spend one more post on concluding thoughts – look for it soon.
