End-of-year giving is crucial for every church.
According to statistics, about 30% of charitable giving occurs in December. Interestingly, the last day of December presents many churches with the highest income.
The way your church handles end-of-year giving determines your budget for the New Year. One challenge most church leaders have is that they don’t like to talk about giving because they see it as sensitive. As we wind up the year, here are five tips to help you encourage end-of-year giving at your church.
How to Encourage End of Year Giving at Your Church
How do you maximize this source of income at your church? Below are five tips to help you out:
Teach about giving
The Bible supports giving so you should teach giving at your church. If your congregants don’t understand how God feels about giving, they will see no reason why they should give. Show them what the scriptures say about giving and the blessings that they will enjoy from this action.
Why should you teach giving towards the end of the year? Here are a few reasons:
- There are more people in the church at this time.
- People are more charitable towards the end of the year.
- Many of your congregants already have giving in mind because of the season.
You can always invite a guest speaker to talk about the subject if you aren’t so comfortable teaching it.
Send a giving letter
One way to encourage giving at your church towards the end of the year is to send a giving letter. Let the recipients know that their end-of-year giving is very important to your church budget. This method has been quite helpful to different charities, ministries, and churches. Here are a few things that your giving letter should contain:
- Warm salutations.
- Introduction of your mission.
- Financial highlights for the year.
- Your budget for the next year.
- State specific concerns.
- How to donate.
- Conclude with a call-to-action.
Prioritize different modes of giving
The regular way of giving is to drop funds in the offering basket or donations box. However, many people may not make it down to the church to drop their donations. If there is no other way to give, then you’d be hindering them from donating.
To avoid this challenge, you should provide alternative modes of giving. Some of these include mobile giving, text giving, church apps like ChurchPad, etc. The more comfortable people are with giving, the easier it is for them to respond to your donation requests.
If you already have mobile giving at your church and people aren’t responding well, the channel might be inefficient. Make inquiries from your congregants to find out if they are having issues with your mobile donation platform. If they are, it is time to change your payment solution to a more user-friendly one.
Draw up a list
Do have certain items or pieces of equipment that your church needs in the New Year? You should draw up a list of these items and share them with your congregants and ministry partners. Let’s face it, some folks may never donate cash but they may have these items in their possession. In such cases, they can donate such items to the church instead of giving cash.
Some individuals prefer to give tangible items to the church. For them, it gives them the feeling of a “proper contribution.” Handing them your list helps them to give in this manner and get this feeling of satisfaction.
Appreciate and celebrate givers
There is no human being that doesn’t love appreciation. Even God loves thanksgiving. So when people give to the church, you should make them feel good by appreciating them.
You need to be quite careful when doing this since some people prefer to give incognito. An option is to seek the giver’s permission to announce their donation during one of your services. You can also organize a special service or dinner for givers and ministry partners.
Conclusion
We have shown you several ways to encourage end-of-year giving at your church. More than anything else, you must be ready to lead by example. People will give more when they know that their leaders are acting out what they preach. Finally, kindly check out ChurchPad to read other insightful articles about church administration.