by Eddie Pipkin

Image by Wagner from Pixabay

I’ve written on this topic before, but this time of year is a great reminder that it’s a subject worth repeating and exploring further.  Although churches are in a special category all their own when it comes to charitable giving . . . are they really?  Let the debate begin!  People make charitable contributions because they believe in the work of the institutions to which they contribute.  The more they feel connected to that work, the more passionate they feel about giving.  This is why it’s important for any donation-supported organization to reinforce those connections.  Churches have historically relied on a sense of disciplined obligation to carry the load.  Other charitable groups can’t afford to take giving for granted in the same way.  That’s where thank you notes come in.

The reason I am thinking about this topic this time of year is because January is when I get the thank you notes from the charities to which my wife and I make donations at the end of the previous year – yes, we’re those people who make late December to causes we value, including humanitarian initiatives, arts groups, and environmental causes.  And also various churches and parachurch organizations.  These days we receive a timely thank you from all of these folks, but it’s the non-church groups who send the handwritten thank you notes.  It has become common practice for 501c3 charities to issue acknowledgements of donations that are personally signed and, more often than not, handcrafted.

This is not a habit practiced by churches and church-related ministries, at least not apparently by the ones to which we give money.  I feel confident this is – how should one phrase it – widely non-practiced.  Why are churches conducting themselves differently than every other charitably supported enterprise out there?

  • Taking people who support their vision for granted.
  • Presuming that giving is a responsibility, not a marketplace choice (and thus not needing a thank you).
  • Inadequate stewardship leadership, structure, and planning.
  • Church leadership refusal to adopt best practices from the “business” world.
  • Lack of initiative and resources.

As I mentioned, I have written on this topic in a previous blog.  After all, stewardship and how we can do it better is one of my favorite topics.  In those observations, I suggested several ways that local churches can do a more focused job of thanking people for their support and helping them understand the impact of their giving.  All of those suggestions hold true a couple of years later, and yet I have seen little evidence that local churches in general are taking advantage of them.

On the other hand, other charitable groups have seem supercharged since the pandemic era in their efforts to express their gratitude to supporters and to take advantage of opportunities to show the ways in which monetary gifts (as well as volunteer hours) have furthered the missions of those groups.

Among those suggestions, handwritten notes are still a high impact practice that has a low-cost threshold, resulting in a lot of bang for the buck.  To receive such correspondence is to feel truly seen and valued.  Of course, it may be true (as noted in the earlier blog post) that the person writing the note from the environmental preservation society or the local arts foundation are paid staff members, but that really is just a testament to how important and effective a strategy it is for making donors feel like they matter.  Churches routinely use volunteers to do the work that would instead be done by paid staff in the business world.  In this case, it would be a reasonable strategy to recruit someone to take on this important role on behalf of church leadership.

Local churches have mailed us acknowledgements of church giving as part of the yearly tax-related giving statement (or sometimes a quarterly statement), and these expressions have sometimes featured a real, honest to goodness signature, occasionally even a quickly scrawled ‘thanks,’ but I can’t recall ever receiving an explicit note thanking me for being part of funding the resources that empower the vision of a local ministry.  Other 501c3s do this regularly and with clarity.

Of course, practicing disciples should not be dependent on such fawning praise to motivate their giving (which is part of the reason why churches are resistant to providing it), but there is a real rush of emotional satisfaction in hearing from the people whose work is supported by our gifts, and churches would benefit from allowing people that burst of pride and purpose.  Congregations that issue regular reminders of the power of stewardship and regularly thank their congregations almost always do this in group settings and almost always in worship (rarely in other formats such as social media).  Such expressions of gratitude are generic and, therefore, have inherently less impact.  A direct, personalized expression matters.

There is even more potential impact in personal conversations about stewardship / giving.  What if we actually called people to thank them for their generosity?  I don’t mean the thank you that immediately leads to a pitch to fill out the annual stewardship card.  I mean a call that exists explicitly to say thanks and tell people how their giving has impacted the ministry in positive ways.  Such calls could also be a forum for letting people ask questions about how ministry works and how they could get more involved.

In a year-round stewardship ministry – not just the once-a-year push to recruit donors and fund the budget that is still the model in most local churches – there are many options for expressing gratitude, building connections, and sharing the impact of the generosity of the people who make ministry happen.  Again, check out the earlier blog for specific suggestions.

Local churches can come up with many unique, creative ways to celebrate giving / stewardship, tailored to their context.  This only happens if there are people who are passionate about this mission who are empowered to pursue it.

How does your local ministry do at thanking people for their sacrificial giving?  How do you celebrate them in personal ways?  How do you show them the impact they have on an ongoing, throughout-the-year basis?  Do you practice the personal touch?  Share your stories and ideas in the comments section.