A 10-Month Strategy to help your congregation meet their end-of-year goals

As the days begin to get shorter, the leaves begin falling, and kids continue to settle into their school routine (even if it’s digitally), these are true signs that the end of the year is coming close. It’s the transition from summer to fall that has people focusing on the things they may have pushed off on their to-do lists all year. From working out, to cleaning out the garage, and even giving, we’re all trying to catch up with the goals we hoped we’d accomplish by the end of the year.

As your people are reviewing their goals, now’s the best time to think about a 10-month giving strategy, an approach to highlight how your givers’ generosity has impacted your community this year and to help them reach their end of year giving goals.

To assist in your 10-month strategy, we’d like to provide you with an outline of some of the best practices to help move people forward in their end of year giving journey.

Highlight the last 10 months of generosity

It’s important that you give your congregation an understanding of how their giving is helping your church expand its reach within your community. People are more willing to give when they can connect their giving to something they can get behind and believe in. You can help them make this connection by providing them with their year-to-date giving statement, how your church has benefited from their giving, and including a list of accomplishments your church has achieved in the past 10 months. Keep track of:

• Every decision for Christ
• Every baptism
• Every new ministry
• Every new staff hire
• Every mission trip
• All of your service projects
• All of your outreach
• All the money that has gone out of your church as benevolence
• All of your growth over the year

Share goals for the next year

Informing your church of what you hope to achieve in the next year, will entice excitement and involvement. Set explicit goals for next year’s budget and tie it with the things you’d like your church to accomplish. When next year starts, make plans to meet those goals and do a regular follow up with your congregation.

You can use Pushpay’s Giving Statements tool to consolidate your messaging (and even include a video, if you’d like) about the last 10 months of generosity, your goals for the next year, and a givers’ digital statement, all within one email.

Send your appreciation

Focus on showing your appreciation and include a genuine thank you message – in addition to the custom message you already have set up – for their contributions and how they have directly impacted the lives of others and initiatives they’ve helped your church achieve.

Pushpay’s Donor Development tool and Church Community Builder’s Process Queues help you with this all year long, but are particularly helpful as you consider what segments of your givers you’d like to reach out to for your 10-month strategy.

Utilize your church app platform

While this is an important time to remind people who had set out a giving goal earlier in the year, it’s also a great time to engage new and occasional givers. Add your message and video about the last 10 months of generosity and your goals for the next year to your custom church app and send it out to your entire community using Push Notifications. Once they’re within your app and looking at your new content, your Pushpay giving is just a click away.

Use your digital tools to support your efforts

Using the digital tools mentioned above makes it easy to send out giving statements on a schedule that better serves your church, and more frequent statements translates to greater awareness on everyone’s part, which encourages mindful giving.

Churches receive a majority of their charitable giving between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. Communicating the need and providing the opportunities to give during this time will be beneficial. For more resources to encourage greater generosity through the holiday season, download the Year-End Giving Success Kit.