By NewChurches.com: In Episode 585 of the NewChurches Q&A Podcast, Daniel and Ed revisit the discussion from episode three on fundraising.

“In a context with so few believers, what strategies would you recommend for church planters to expand their network in order to raise financial support?”

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

Ways to leverage new networks
Different types of fundraising

 Shareable Quotes (#NewChurches):

“Join a network or a denomination.” – @edstetzer
“Getting an endorsement from someone else and leveraging their network is one option.” – @danielsangi
“Joining an association, denomination, or network is another way to expand your network to raise financial support.” – @danielsangi
“If there are churches of your denomination and network near you, you can reach out.” – @edstetzer
“Fundraising doesn’t always mean that I get someone else to pay me full time, it can mean that I get a job.” – @edstetzer
“There are so many ways these days with the gig economy that you don’t need to be tied to a schedule or a desk, but be free to minister and to plant and not 100% rely on outside fundraising.” – @danielsangi

Recommended Resources:

Listen to Episode 3: Fundraising That Works
Read You Are What You Do by Daniel Im
Read “One-on-One with Daniel Im on ‘You Are What You Do’”

Help us Multiply the Mission:

Please subscribe
Leave a rating and review on iTunes
Ask a question by clicking Send Voicemail on the right hand side of NewChurches.com
If you’re on a phone or a tablet, then go to www.speakpipe.com/newchurches to download the app and record your message
When you’re recording, introduce yourself and your context in about 15 seconds and then record your question for 30 seconds

This Episode’s Sponsor:

No matter how many people you have on staff at your church, there’s only so much you can accomplish in a day, right? Your church exists to serve your community, so the mission of your church and its staff is to reach as many people as you can.

So BELAY, the innovative staffing solution with over 10 years of experience serving churches with virtual assistants, bookkeepers and social media strategists, is offering a free download of their resource, ‘Church Leaders: Essential Strategies to Unleash Productivity.’

Let BELAY help your church live its mission in your community by helping you juggle less and accomplish more. Visit belaysolutions.com/lifeway for your free download.

The post Episode 585: Revisiting Fundraising That Works appeared first on NewChurches.com – Church Planting, Multisite, and Multiplication.

Source: Episode 585: Revisiting Fundraising That Works

The post Episode 585: Revisiting Fundraising That Works appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: The US government has approved a stimulus package to help small businesses and nonprofits across the country. And it’s OK to use the Payroll Protection Program for church plants.

Have you seen the daily webinars about this? It’s been a fast moving target since the government wrote it, approved it and enacted it in about a week. Everybody’s scrambling to interpret and understand how it works and what to do.

Part of the larger CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security), loans are offered to small businesses, nonprofit and churches to help prevent layoffs and pay cuts. And the loans may be forgiven up to 100%. Others have done a better job of explaining the ins and outs of the Payroll Protection Program for church plants (see below), so I won’t duplicate that here.

It feels a bit like the California Gold Rush. The government has funded $350B, but that’s not nearly enough to provide relief for all the businesses, nonprofits and churches that will be applying. So it’s going to be a first come, first served situation.

After much watching and reading, here are my…

Tips & Tactics

Finish your research yesterday

This all happened so fast, but many fellow believers have already put together some great resources. Here are resources that helped me:

Vanderbloemen’s various Live events and free resourcesECFA CARES Impact on ChurchesUS Chamber of Commerce Emergency Loans Guide & Checklist

Talk to your bank on Thursday, April 2

They are scrambling to be ready same as everybody else. And you want to deal with a banker that’s up to speed and ready to go when the program opens on Friday, April 3.

The program is backed by the US Small Business Administration (SBA), but administered by banks and other lenders.

Make an appointment to come back with your application Friday morning.

Have your paperwork ready on Thursday, April 2

Download and complete the Paycheck Protection Program Application Form and get it filled out. They only just made it available Tuesday evening, March 31.

Dig up all of your payroll expenses back to February 2019. To help compile everything, here is a free spreadsheet from my friend Sean Havera at Unite Community Church. He built this for the Payroll Protection Program for church plants and offers it as-is and on condition that you consult with your accountant and/or lender on all final calculations.

Download free PPP calculation spreadsheet

You’ll be averaging your payroll from last year. Common opinion is that if you haven’t been running payroll that long, you can average the months that you did have payroll expenses. That’s great for the newest church planters!

Apply at your bank Friday Morning, April 3

Seriously, you want to be at the front of the line.

If you’ve decided to apply, I hope these tips & tactics help with applying for the Payroll Protection Program for church plants.

The post Payroll Protection Program for Church Plants – Tips & Tactics appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: Payroll Protection Program for Church Plants – Tips & Tactics

The post Payroll Protection Program for Church Plants – Tips & Tactics appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Source: 7 Big Tips for Funding Your Ministry Vision This Year

The post 7 Big Tips for Funding Your Ministry Vision This Year appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: You’ve probably run into this: you want to send out a newsletter or important announcement but some people prefer email, some text and some social media. Who has time to manage multiple communication channels?

One of the ironies of our age of communication is that communicating as a organization can be harder. It’s easier and faster in some respects, but the proliferation of channels means that your audience is going to be split by personal preference.

The Obvious Choices

There is no perfect solution or channel. The common or obvious ways to get the word out are:

Email (including from your church management software)
Text
Website
Social Media
Mobile App

As a church planter, you’re going to run into this early as your raise financial support, build a prayer team and gather a launch team.

Every church runs into this on an ongoing basis with newsletters, events and other important announcements.

Your Options

There have been two basic approaches for churches to manage communication channels until recently:

Force everyone to conform to your preferred channel
Copy & paste to each platform every time you want to send something out

Fortunately, a new option is emerging and even becoming more and more reliable.

Automation!

There is a growing category of software that creates bridges between other popular apps. It’s a pretty simple idea: you set up a trigger that then fires an action. For example, whenever you create a new post on your church Facebook page, the service will automatically send a group text.

The ones I’ve tested out are:

Zapier
IFTTT (If This, Then That)

And I was pleasantly surprised to find almost a dozen other options that do the same thing.

This will take a few minutes to set up, but will save you hours over the course of a year.

First, decide on which communication channel will be your master. One inherent challenge will be the length of your message:

Short to Long – Twitter & text give you limited real estate, which is fine for their own platforms, but 140 characters is unimpressive as a blog post or email newsletter
Long to Short – You can say more but you’ll have to figure out how to automatically shorten it for Twitter & text

Then build your automations and set them in motion.

An Example

One way you could do this is to set up Mailchimp as your master, then set up the following automations:

post the message to your Facebook page using their native integration
post to your Facebook group using Zapier (group vs. page)
post to Twitter using their native integration (creates a hyperlink to full message)
send the shortened tweet as a group text using Zapier and Twilio (a paid app)
create a post on your WordPress website (perhaps on a news or announcements page?)
posting to your Mobile App will depend on your app developer

With this set up, every time you send a new Mailchimp, it automatically gets broadcast across all the different channels.

Another inherent challenge will be managing your contact lists. All of this sounds simple enough on the sending end, but there’s the whole matter of getting people to sign up for their preferred channel(s) and keeping their contact info and preferences up to date. But that’s a post for another day.

Don’t discouraged when faced with having to manage multiple communication channels. Make automation do the redundant stuff for you so that you can use your time for more important ministry!

The post How to Manage Multiple Communication Channels appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How to Manage Multiple Communication Channels

The post How to Manage Multiple Communication Channels appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: When a business or individual donates something, send them a church donor acknowledgement letter for their tax records.

A local coffee shop has generously offered to provide coffee and muffins for your workers at a community service event. How exciting! All they want in return is a tax receipt so that they can write off the donation when they file their business return next year.

One of the first financial systems you set up for your church is keeping track of cash tithes & offerings so you can mail out giving statements to your supporters and members. You can include non-cash donations in those annual giving statements, but the receipt you give them right away is different when the donation isn’t monetary (cash/check/ACH/card).

The Church Donor Acknowledgement Letter

All other things being roughly equal, I see 2 main differences in a church donor acknowledgement letter:

No Dollar Amount

You describe the donation but do not valuate it. That actually makes your job a whole lot easier. It’s up to the donor to determine its value when they file their taxes. All you have to do is record what was given.

Different Disclaimer

For tithes and offerings to a church, you should include the language:

No good or services were provided by our organization in consideration of this donation apart from intangible religious benefits.” (or similar)

You finally got that shoe store to donate 20 pairs of shoes to your church for your back-to-school community service project. They should absolutely get a receipt, but they probably didn’t give the shoes for “intangible religious benefit.” Your church donor acknowledgement letter can omit the last part of the disclaimer.

What to Include

According to the IRS, your church donor acknowledgement letter must include:

your church’s name
description (but not value) of the non-cash contribution
a statement that no goods or services were provided by your church

…and I would recommend adding:

a statement that your church is a 501c3 tax-exempt organization
your church’s federal EIN (some people will call this your ‘nonprofit number’)

When This Doesn’t Apply

You’ll need a 3rd version of a donation receipt if you’ve given the donor anything worth more than $10 at the time they made their cash or non-cash donation.

For instance, you do a fundraiser dinner and charge $50 a plate at the door. If the cost of the dinner is $15, you need to disclose that, and they’ll only get to write off $35 on their taxes. Or maybe you send each of your outside supporters a year-end photo book of the life of your church as a special thank-you. Keep it under $10 or it has to go on the giving statement.

There are still plenty of generous individuals and business owners out there willing to do good in the community through a church. There’s no reason you can’t send them a thank you letter that also serves as their tax receipt.

So use these guidelines to draft yours today or check out this free template from Passion for Planting to get you started.

The post How to Write a Church Donor Acknowledgement Letter appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: How to Write a Church Donor Acknowledgement Letter

The post How to Write a Church Donor Acknowledgement Letter appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: A church website privacy policy would be a page on your website that explains how your church  collects personal information and how you use it.

Even an initial site for your supporters might be set up to collect information. Most church websites offer some or all of the following data collection forms:

Email newsletter signup
Contact us
Online donation

If someone signs up for your newsletter, do you make it plain what you’re going to do with their email address? Do you set a cookie on their browser (even ethically) so that they’ll see your online ad before a big event you’ll promote?

I’m a little torn on this – on the one hand it sounds a little over-the-top for small, startup, volunteer organizations to go to this kind of trouble. My first reaction was, “For real?!?”

Which is maybe a little contradictory because personally I’m pretty security and privacy cautious. I’m not prone to hand out my own info willy-nilly. And there are even mobile apps I won’t use because they grant themselves way too much access to every bit of sensitive info on my phone.

But let’s take it a step further – do you encourage everyone to fill out a connection card (paper or electronic) and then get that information into a church database? Would guests be creeped out to know you even have a church database that isn’t disclosed anywhere?

Examples of Church Website Privacy Policy

This has never really been on my radar, so it was a little to my surprise that it was pretty easy to find a church website privacy policy on prominent sites:

Elevation Church
The Rock Church
Saddleback Church
North Point Community Church

Resources for Creating Your Own

Make your own decision about whether you’ll include a church website privacy policy now or someday. When you do, here are some FREE resources that should help:

FreePrivacyPolicy.com which I used to create mine
RocketLawyer.com
Better Business Bureau
UpCounsel.com

I’m interested to hear your take on this. Join the conversation on social media and let me know!

The post Do We Need a Church Website Privacy Policy? appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: Do We Need a Church Website Privacy Policy?

The post Do We Need a Church Website Privacy Policy? appeared first on Passion for Planting.

Once you get to the launch of your regular worship gatherings, your church plant website will have gone through several stages. Plan ahead for these 3 church plant website stages so you can transition intentionally instead of accidentally.

Your major church plant website stages will take their cues from your changing audience. Whenever you’re writing website content, you should always ask and remind yourself, “Who’s my audience?” And you’ll have to rewrite your content at least twice.

Stage 1: Your Supporters

Very early in your church planting process, you’re going to need a web page to direct your supporters to. You probably only need a single page, so keep it simple. But a website will be really handy for accepting online donations as you raise funds.

You may not have even named your church yet, so here are some options at this stage:

1. Get a dedicated page on a supporting church or planting organization’s site
2. Use one of those simple website builders that assigns you a subdomain (it’ll look like mychurchplant.[nameofservice].com)
3. Buy a temporary domain name to use for a year (like thecheboyganproject.com) and host your own page

Nobody is going to be stumbling onto your site through internet searches at this stage, so you don’t have to worry too much about SEO. You’ll send your supporters a direct, clickable link through email or text.

Stage 2: Your Team

As you network in the community and begin gathering a team, you’re going to want a site to establish your credibility. Now you need to de-emphasize the ‘money talk’ and emphasize vision, community involvement, and recruitment. Write new content addressed not to the community at large, but to people that you’re meeting personally.

You can transition a temporary domain (#3 above) and just bury the supporter page under a menu. But the first 2 options above begin to crash & burn at this stage. They can be great early on, but they’re not good long-term solutions.

You can launch your own simple website at this point and leave the fundraising page going on its own. But who wants to manage 2 websites?

Before too long, you’ll name the church and buy a permanent domain name. If you’ve gone with hosting your own site, you just swap out the domain name; you don’t have to lose your work.

Stage 3: Your Community

Several months before your grand opening of regular worship gatherings, you’ll need to transition the website to its permanent audience: your community. My friend Russ over at Catalyst Creative recommends keeping your website laser-focused on your external audience and launching a church app for your internal audience.

There is plenty more to be said about designing your permanent website (which should never really be permanent BTW), but that’s for another post.

For now as you’re getting started, plan ahead for these church plant website stages so that you’re saying the right things to the right audience. At the right time.

The post 3 Church Plant Website Stages appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: 3 Church Plant Website Stages

The post 3 Church Plant Website Stages You Need to Transition Through appeared first on Passion for Planting.