Dec/093
Advertising When Money is Tight
Barry asks how he can get the word out about his church plant when he doesn’t have money to pay for postcards and his city won’t allow him to put out road signs. Here’s some thoughts, and I would love for you to chime in.
1. Make road signs and have people put them in their own yards.
2. Print simple flyers (you can get nice full-color ones online for cheap) and get a group of your people to put them on doors personally. The most expensive part of postcards is the postage.
3. Print up some t-shirts and ask your people to them around town on a certain day or give your people bumper stickers for their cars. Or have them write with shoe polish on their windows.
4. Print business card size invites to a series (less than $50) and teach your people how to use them. Personal invitations are the absolute best way to invite people to church. About 75% of our first time guests come because they are personally invited.
5. Go through your budget and cut some internal stuff and use it on getting people there. My guess is that you could cut somewhere. You may need to sacrifice something you think is necessary to free up some money to get people to church.
6. Hire The Change Group to help you generate more operational revenue.
7. Make sure your church service is amazing. Somehow, people show up at what is good.
What would you add to this list?
Dec/090
The Giving Talk
Whenever we receive an offering at Oak Leaf Church (which is every weekend), we always do a giving talk to explain what is happening. This giving talk might be a Biblical challenge, a video showing where the money goes, a thank you, or something vision related. We let guests know that they are encouraged to give, but not expected to give. And we pray over the offering. Here’s a recent giving talk from one of our services.
We take this time seriously and we plan it out just like we would plan any other service element. What do you do when it comes to receiving the offering in your church?
May/090
Offering Talks
Before we receive the offering, we always explain it and do a short offering talk. Here’s some of the statements we use to encourage people to give.
1. If God wants your money, he’ll take it.
2. I don’t need your money, but you need to give it.
3. You haven’t really worshipped until you’ve given.
4. It’s not really giving unless you miss it.
5. We are not owners, we’re managers.
6. Tithing is trusting.
7. Where we allocate money is a representation of what is really important to us.
8. You’ve been blessed because somebody else gave.
From time to time, we also let people know where the money goes, either through a video or a story or a chart on the screen.
Apr/090
Church Plant Fundraising
Some of the most common questions we get on this blog are in the area of fund raising. One such question is “how much does it cost to plant a church.”
My answer: everything you’ve got.
If you raise $50,000 then you’ll spend every bit of it. If you have less, it can cost less. If you raise more, it can cost more. There’s no set number.
I know of churches with amazing funding who blew threw it and never made it. And I know churches that launched on shoestring budgets that are doing well.
Just so you know, between January 1, 2006 and August 20, 2006 (our grand opening), we spent about $55,000 on everything. That included equipment, marketing, outreach and salaries. Our first mailout went to 5,000 homes because that’s how much money we had. If we got something on Sunday, we spent it on Monday.
I write about fundraising in my upcoming book, and I’m sure we’ll hit on it in an upcoming coaching network.
Feb/090
How Much Money?
A lot of the questions that we get a lot from church planters (we love church planters!) are about money. What’s an early budget like? How much money did you raise?
From January 1, 2006 – when we got serious with gearing up for launch – to August 20, 2006 (our grand opening service), we spent about $50,000.
We would have spent more if we had it, but that’s all we raised. I tell people that church planting will cost everything that you have. We would have done it with less; we would have certainly spent more.
Our first direct mail was 5,000 pieces…that’s all we could afford. When we got money on Sunday, we’d but the next thing on our list. Our first budgets were, in retrospect, kind of funny, because we didn’t really know how much things cost.
How much will is cost? Everything you got.
Nov/080
Guide to the Giving Talk
Each week in our services, we receive an offering (you don’t ever take an offering by the way). Before we do that, someone from our church explains what is happening. We don’t view the offering as a tacked on element, but we try to plan and prepare it just like we do the singing or the sermon. We want to connect the time of giving to everything else that is happening that day.
Here’s a 2-page PDF Guide to the Giving Talk that we put together to make sure that people on stage know exactly what should happen during this 2-3 minutes of our service.
Dec/070
Show me the money…
Church finances are a lot more then balancing the checkbook. Anyone can add up all of the expenses and see how much money is left over in the bank. At Oak Leaf Church we are just too new to have accurate starting numbers for anything other then salary, so we had to do a lot of guessing. With that said, we felt like one of the most helpful things we could do would be to creating spending procedures.
None of the following are brain-buster ideas, but they do provide a starting point if anyone is starting a business, starting a church, or trying to impress their boss.
The basic outline for the plan, was to give people a ministry budget as a guide. We knew that people would want to spend their money at the same time, so in order to have enough cash we gave them guidelines. We said that they could spend their budgets at their leisure, but it would be weighted toward strategic times of the year when they would likely want to do events to build their ministry. First of the year, Easter, right before school starts and Thanksgiving/Christmas are all key times.
The last caution was that it all might not go according to plan, so if the money doesn’t come it (we based our budget on a 12% increase) then they would have to get creative.
More later, we still have to see if it works like we hope, but for more details click here.
Anthony Gratto
Executive Pastor
Dec/070
Spending Procedures
We just locked down our 2008 budget and finalized some spending procedures. The budget is a guide for spending, and we’ll live by it in 2008. In addition to creating this budget (which was a joint effort from our staff then approved by our board of directors), we put some spending procedures in place to help manage cash flow. Just because money is in the budget doesn’t mean it’s in the bank. So here’s what we do.
- Expense under $100: staff can just buy it. Most have church credit cards. They need to make sure it’s a budgeted item and turn in the coded receipt.
- $100-$500: Staff member must get approval from their direct supervisor.
- $500 or more: Purchase order discussed in Lead Team meeting.
Sep/071
First Time Giver Letter
One of the things we do at OLC is follow up with first time givers. When someone gives to Oak Leaf Church for the first time, we send them a letter thanking them for their gift. I think it’s important to thank people that give, as well as reassure them that the church is on top of things with the finances. Here’s the letter we send out in Word format.
first-time-giver.doc
Aug/070
Business Reply Mail
Most of our weekly offering comes in when we pass around buckets at the conclusion of our service. Most people turn in their connection cards this way as well.
But just like a few people always take their connection card to the Information Table, some people mail their tithes and offerings to our office each week. Several months ago, we started putting envelopes with our handouts on Sunday morning. Lots of people feel more comfortable giving cash this way. Today, we just got in 10,000 new envelopes from Action Envelope. We created them as business reply envelopes, so people can just drop them in a mailbox and mail them to the office without having to worry about a stamp.
It costs less than $1 to get this in the mail, and the permit and design was not that expensive. I think it’s a sharp way to equip your people to give on a regular basis. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Resources
