Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs - Recruiting Ambassadors for Giving

March 4, 2014

Recruiting Ambassadors for Giving

Recruiting volunteers for fundraising can be a community-altering task. Sue Fornabai, Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) financial resources consultant, tells the following story of gathering parishioners to be ambassadors for annual giving:

A stewardship chair was asked to gather volunteers from the congregation for an initial organizational meeting. This would be a time to talk about the spirituality of giving before distributing pledge cards to the volunteer ‘ambassadors for giving’ to use in conversations with donors.

Anticipating the annual ‘push back’, the chair thought about what he could do to ensure a large turnout. He believed many folks would say, “ I cannot ask people for money. Ask me to do something else.” He prayed over this challenge, asking God to assist.

Believing that his role as an ambassador for Christ was to reach out to others, the chair decided to contact every member of the congregation. He acquired the list of names and phone numbers from the office, then set aside one week and contacted every parishioner. He made calls in the early morning and the early evening, including all day Saturday and Sunday after church.

By reaching out and making that initial connection, the chair modeled relationship building. During the conversations, he spoke of the importance of gifting the love of God through a gift to an annual campaign. His short message had an enormous impact…. And it brought a good number of people to the meeting.

His invitation had a number of positive outcomes:

Some members of the congregation, who would not have ordinarily attended the meeting, decided to come because the chair of the stewardship committee reached out to them.
Some parishioners had no interest in volunteering, but instead dropped by to pick up their pledge card.
Some were very willing to make personal contact with other parishioners, with many of these conversations being made prior to or following church service. Wonderfully, only a few pledge cards needed to be mailed to people.

The take away for the stewardship chair was that he re-connected with many people in his congregation that he had not spoken to for a while! He was energized and actually volunteered to be stewardship chair for the coming year.

How do you engage your volunteers for annual giving each year?