I’ve decided the only thing worse than doing a weekly bulletin is doing communications for a capital campaign.
Campaigns suck time, energy, and resources and requite an incredible amount of work. And let’s be honest, whenever we communicate things related to money our jobs get very uncomfortable. No one likes when the church talks about money let alone when we ask them to give more!
In March, Park launched a campaign and we had our work cut out for us. There were a few key factors that made it complicated…
- It was completely focused on paying off debt. There were no buildings to be built or projects to fund… we just needed extra cash to make payments that were coming due on our previous building project. It’s easy for people to give to something they can tangibly see but it’s much harder when the focus is debt retirement.
- This was the third capital campaign Park had done in the span of five years. Yes, three in five years. With the amount of new people in the church as well as the number of people who come and go in the city, nearly 60% of the people who are a part of our church today hadn’t been around for the first two.
- We launched the campaign during a time of financial hardship for a majority of our congregation. People in our church were just beginning to feel the affects of our economic downturn. Not exactly the most opportune time to ask them to give more.
Consulting firms that work with churches on stewardship campaigns have a cookie-cutter way of running them which typically consists of making lots of glossy handouts, having countless meetings, doing private invite events, doing a huge song-and-dance, etc.
We didn’t do any of that… we broke the rules… here’s what we did…
We Weren’t Shy About Why We Were Doing the Campaign
Instead of going with some clever or catchy title for the campaign, we were forward with what it was about when we named it… We called it [IN]VEST. We were also very open and transparent about the state of our finances an why we needed to do a campaign.
Last fall, we put this video together to explain our financial situation:
We Didn’t Do Glossy Brochures
Since the goal of this campaign was to pay off debt, it didn’t make sense to go into debt by printing brochures and handouts. We already don’t print much at Park, so we opted to keep things simple and use space in service and existing communication pieces to communicate what the campaign was all about. The only print piece we did was our response card.
We Cut The Amount of Meetings
Instead of doing leaders gatherings, private ‘large donor’ events or all of the other meetings that are usually suggested, we scaled down to one gathering that we repeated over the course of five nights. We invited our entire church to come with their small groups to learn more and to ask questions. We recorded that meeting and posted it online so anyone that couldn’t attend was able to get the content.
We Made The Campaign About our Vision
We used the campaign as an opportunity to recommunicate our vision. With so many people new to our church, we used the campaign as an opportunity to re-tell our story, share our legacy, and challenge people to invest in future of our church.
We also created this awesome video which linked the story of Park to the story of the Church!
We Tied it Into a Teaching Series
We spent a total of four weeks doing a teaching series called [IN]VEST where we challenged our church to invest in a holistic way, not just with their finances, but with their time and talent. The focus was more on what they were doing with their whole lives, not just their checkbook.
We Got our Small Groups On Board
We put together a 52-page study guide that our entire church went through over the span of six weeks where the idea of [IN]VEST was further unpacked and discussed in small groups. The study also included practical resources like helping people evaluate how they were investing their time, challenged them to consider how they were using their gifts and talents, and assisted them in creating a personal budget.
We Told Stories
There were people in our church who were already investing in major ways, so we used the campaign as an opportunity to tell their stories.
This is a cool story of a couple who chose to step out in faith and invest in a dream God had placed on their hearts while facing the challenges of raising children in the city.
We Launched a New Church Campus
As a church, our vision is to invest in the city by planting new churches in strategic neighborhoods. The week before the ‘big ask’ we prayed for and launched a new church campus in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood. [Which had standing room only their first Sunday!] This was a tangible way of showing how we, as a church, were investing and an opportunity to remind people that the more we were able to pay off of our debt the more we’d have to invest in church planting.
We Challenged People To Do More Than Give Money
Earlier in the year we challenged our church to pray around three specific areas: 1 Person, 1 Neighborhood, and 1 Injustice. So, instead of just asking people to give a dollar amount, we asked for the names of the people they were praying for, the neighborhoods they wanted to impact and the wrong they wanted to right. And we were very clear that if people weren’t in a position to give financially that we wanted everyone to commit to invest in some way.
We Used Texting
I’ll share on how we used texting throughout this campaign and let you know the final results tomorrow!
Stay tuned!
