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Church Tech Check
A smarter way to thank year-end givers
Upgrade your church’s year-end giving strategy with smarter, easier ways to thank donors and inspire ongoing generosity through Pushpay.
Church teams always feel a combination of emotions toward the year’s end. On one hand, you’re about to see a passionate swell of enthusiasm from your community. Faith and celebration explodes in communities at year’s end.
But on the flip side, you and your staff have to manage all that excitement with intention. Year-end planning requires every ounce of time and talent your staff can muster, to ensure you don’t fumble this once-a-year opportunity to amplify generosity and bring the community deeper into the life of your ministry.
As you’re preparing for this coming holiday season, take time to ensure the generosity of your members will be thoughtfully acknowledged. A tremendous percentage of your annual donations are about to drop into your coffers, and showing sincere appreciation to givers is vital to ensuring they feel ongoing investment in your mission. The importance of thanking year-end givers cannot be overstated.
So this year, let’s upgrade your approach to showing gratitude to those who’ve entrusted you to shepherd their generosity. Good news is, it’s much easier than you may think…
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Celebrate gifts in the moment
You’re busy. Your team is stretched to their limits. Which means, at year’s end, it’s easy to delay showing gratitude to those who gave to your church.
Technology is your knight in shining armor. The right tools can help you streamline gratitude:
On-screen celebration: It’s a small thing that makes a major impact. Every donation through Pushpay’s mobile app launches a blast of confetti, immediately reinforcing the joy behind every gift.
Immediate receipts: Emails confirming successful transactions, sent moments after the donation, instills trust that a gift landed where the donor intended.
App-based storytelling: Your custom mobile app is a powerful channel for posting updates that shoot straight to your members’ phones. While—as much as you may want to—you can’t customize every message for every gift received, it’s a nice year-end touch to post regular video clips acknowledging the community’s gifts as a whole.
Even better: Consider setting up a year-end fundraising goal. Set a benchmark for your congregation to strive for, perhaps tied to an upcoming major project? This doubled-down sense of team spirit will drive them to contribute even more at year’s end, and you can send regular updates on their progress through the app!
Special appreciation for complex gifts
Did you know that stock and crypto gifts are typically massively larger than traditional cash donations? And that the majority of them arrive at year’s end?
Make sure to acknowledge these uniquely impactful donations. Have your team craft specific language that speaks to these types of gifts; in doing so, you’ll set the groundwork for year-end stock and crypto giving next year, possibly inspiring congregants who never realized these types of gifts were an option before.
Gratitude in annual statements
Yes, your annual giving statements need to check several legal requirements. But they’re also an amazing opportunity to show the impact of an individual or family’s generosity.
Once again, because it’s simply not possible to write a personalized note to each and every community member who donated, focus on the macro effects of the congregation’s donations. Talk about goals reached and lives touched. Share the intangible stuff too, like how their investment in the life of your ministry has inspired your team to work even harder in the coming year.
The power of appreciation
Showing thanks is obviously not relegated to year-end gifts. It should be a practice your team implements all year long.
But you can make an especially long-lasting impact in the minds of your donors with thoughtful, customized, sincere displays of year-end thanks.
And you don’t have to put that burden on your team alone: Learn more about how Pushpay’s technology solutions make thanking year-end givers a breeze through our intuitive giving and communications tools.
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Jonathan Louvis
Jon is the SEO Marketing Manager at Pushpay. Most recently, he worked as the Communications Director for his local church in Ohio. Having worked in the Church, he’s able to bring a unique perspective to his role at Pushpay. When he’s not busy creating content, you can find him spending time with his wife, two sons, and dog, or indulging his love of fantasy football. Jon holds a B.S in Marketing Management and an M.B.A from Western Governors University.
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