Overview
Is it easy and painless to balance your operating budget each year? Are you facing a budget deficit? Are you able to set aside sufficient reserves? Do most of your members (and pledging friends) understand the financial realities of your congregation? Is everyone comfortable talking about money and its relationship to mission? Is it easy to find volunteers to carry out your annual pledge drive?
If you answered yes to all of the above questions, congratulations! If not, our Strategic Financial and Asset Planning Process may be for you.
Many of our Unitarian Universalist congregations have a fraught relationship with money. Balancing the budget and finding stewardship volunteers seem to get more difficult every year. Congregants generally have a limited understanding of finances and assets and their importance to furthering mission.
The past few years have brought this reality into sharper focus. The pandemic, along with reduced membership and attendance, and aging populations have exacerbated financial stresses. Even in “normal times,” our way of managing funds, especially annual budgets, has proven challenging. Balancing the budget and running pledge drives are no one’s favorite pastimes!
Working with UU congregations, Stewardship for Us developed a Strategic Financial Planning service to help congregations manage their resources more effectively and with less stress. The process enables congregations to step back from the year-to-year budgeting and pledging process and look longer term at their priorities and goals using their assets as a unified whole.
Benefits: Why do this?
- Promote long-term sustainability
- Support mission, growth, and transformation
- Align assets and resources with mission and priorities
- Provide a comprehensive and strategic view of all assets and resources
- Engage congregants in the spiritual and practical understanding of money, minus the stresses of balancing the upcoming budget
- Explore multiple scenarios and encourage experimentation
- Educate and inspire congregants about the possibilities and value of their gifts
- Provide a roadmap and a mechanism to track progress and make mid-course corrections
- Integrate with other strategic planning efforts and products
- Move forward faster and sustain momentum
What We Offer
We offer a template for a comprehensive resource and asset plan, along with a process for developing and maintaining the plan and tracking progress. We help you set up a planning team to carry out the planning process and guide you to avoid pitfalls. We offer varying levels of support, tailored to your needs. Some congregations require minimal assistance to launch and guide the process while others engage Stewardship for Us for more assistance with different phases of the effort. Our process is quick and affordable.
Success Stories
Check out our 2022 GA workshop on Sustainable Financial Planning at this link: https://www.uua.org/leaderlab/financial-sustainability. You’ll hear from representatives of three congregations we worked with on financial and asset planning.