10% to 20% of your time every week should be spent on stewardship! I made that comment recently on one of our Monday Morning With Mark The Stewardship Coach webinars. I could almost hear guys falling off their chairs. I know, on top of your busy week here I am adding more to the work load. Yet I firmly believe that you MUST spend time in stewardship planning to be fully funded.
How can you spend 10% to 20% weekly? It is not as hard as you might think and you don’t need an alarm clock sitting on the conference table. For instance I want you to consider rearranging your staff meeting so that you spend at least 15 minutes EVERY week focusing upon giving. To that end I would recommend the following steps for the stewardship segment of your staff meetings…
- Review the weekend offering. Make sure all of your staff knows what the budget need is and what came in over the weekend. Compare that to last week, last month and last year. Keep your staff abreast of where giving stands!
- Review online giving tracking the amounts, any new recurring gifts etc.
- Review the offering of the past weekend. What was done well? What needed to be improved, etc.?
- Preview the coming week’s offering. What will be said and who will say it? How can you make the offering powerful? Engage your staff and their creativity to make the thirty to sixty seconds before the offering help members see the value in their gifts.
- Once a month preview events coming up and discuss how best to position those for giving success. Again engage your staff to use their gifts to make the appeal for dollars resonate with your members.
What about the rest of the week? Let me list out activities that will easily help you meet that 10% to 20%. I would recommend that…
- Pick one morning a week and read several blogs on stewardship for thirty minutes. All you have to do is Google, “blogs on stewardship,” and you are off and running.
- Read at least one stewardship related book a quarter.
- Write personal thank you notes to your top donors telling them that you prayed for them and that you appreciate their support that allows your church to do the ministry they do.
Do you really need to spend so much time on stewardship planning and preparation? Some weeks you will and others you will not. The point is that you need to dedicate some amount of time to the process to be fully funded. I find that what I regularly schedule and do gets done over time. Keep doing the above steps and I think you will find that stewardship will become much easier for you as time goes by.
One more thing, get help! My Giving365 program provides you will all the tools you need AND it only costs $1 a day! Sign up today and let’s get you started on the path to being fully funded!
Mark Brooks The Stewardship Coach