Planning for Your Pledge Drive

Thanks to everyone who came to our Friday Forum on planning for a spring pledge drive. The slides are available here (the session was not recorded, as is our practice when a good amount of time is spent in breakout rooms). Because you now have the slides with all of our points on them, I will not relist them here. Instead, I will write a bit about each topic. As always, you can reach out to us if you need help or with suggestions for future sessions.

Note: we are concerned about the just use of people’s images in our work. Gratefully, our own Kay Crider took the fun photographs used in the presentation (and above).

Building Your Team
Most important here is to build a team – seems obvious, yet it is not so common. If you have one or two people trying to do your pledge drive without assistance, you will probably not do well and will certainly burn them out. The goal is to have a good sized core group with new folks recruited every year, so people are cycling in and out of the pledge team. There are lots of different roles to take, with different amounts of commitment, so there should be something for everyone. If someone helps you on the Sunday you launch the pledge drive with special snacks at coffee hour, include them as a volunteer. The more the merrier!

Drive Strategies
You are going to try to reach everyone. Make sure you are communicating on all platforms to reach as many people as you can (more on this below). Aside from that, whether you are focused on individual conversations, small groups, larger groups, or big events, you need to include the same elements. See The Joy of Asking below for more on this. Please remember that you are not a corporation or even a standard nonprofit; you are reaching out to your “Community of Beloveds” so make any strategy warm and personal.

Drive Partners
The annual pledge drive is not some unpleasant chore you are forced to do every year, like the laundry your college kid brought home from school with them. First of all, it is an all-congregation project and everyone has a role – whether it is pledging, doing worship, educating people, managing data entry, publishing the newsletter, or accounting for pledges. Include the kids and youth; they are future stewards of our congregations! It is also an annual celebration of all the good work we do, so have fun with it.

Giving Guidance
As UUs, we don’t tell people what to believe. We ask them to figure out what they believe and live according to it, as best they can. It is the same with stewardship; we don’t tell people what to give, we ask them to use their best selves to figure it out, and do their best to fulfill it. For that reason it is up to us, as congregations, to provide guidance and discernment materials. Remember that some people love numbers, some respond to stories, or pictures; some will be inspired by what has been achieved, others by what is possible. But people give to people, so being in relationship is the most important aspect of giving guidance. We care about our members and know that if they grow their generosity, they are growing as people.

Communications
Make a timeline and plan for communicating with the congregation in all formats. You need to be methodical and consistent – use your brain. At the same time, you need to use your heart to touch people by telling moving stories & images and inspiring them. Be creative and try new things – it is an ever year thing, so you can experiment. Your members will appreciate that too. They care about the congregation and want to give; your role is facilitating that. In fact, most of your drive is communicating to very faithful people who will certainly give you a pledge. For most folks, it is about how much and when they pledge. Keep that in mind.

Two Ways are Better than One
We had a whole way of doing a pledge drive, with tools and systems for it – before March of 2020. Remember? Then suddenly very little of it would work and we had to pivot quickly to a completely different way of doing things. Well, we are back to where we can once again do many of the things we did pre-Pandemic. But now we also have folks that only join us virtually – in essence we have two communities. In order to reach everyone effectively, we now need to do both the old ways (which worked) and the new ways!

Make Giving Easy
There are so many ways of transferring financial resources from a person to your congregation. Take advantage of as many of them as you can manage. If you have a database, that will often help with ways to give and receive pledges and gifts. Make sure to offer them in an understandable way. And remember, different people have unique preferences for giving and have financial resources stored in different parts of their economic life. Your goal is to accommodate and facilitate the pledge and gifts as much as possible.

The Joy of Asking
How often do we hear, “I will do anything, but I can’t ask people for money”? The story behind that may be different for each person who says it, but there is certainly a story (or 2). Our congregations are places where we can have a different understanding of making requests about financial resources. That we are trustworthy and will not violate our personal relationships by pressuring, being manipulative, giving specific expectations, or shaming someone. We can do stewardship with the First Principle of UUism: honoring the, Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person.

Using this simple acronym might help:
S: Share. Share a story about yourself or the congregation. Ask them to share as well.
E: Explain. Explain how the pledge drive works, what is needed, what is hoped for.
A: Ask. Ask directly and simply. If you don’t, you will befuddle them because they are waiting for it. Then it is up to them to decide.
T: Thank. Thank them personally in a heartfelt way. Even if they don’t pledge at that moment, thank them for engaging with you, for all they do to support the congregation. Thank them for being them!