2 Critical Tips to Maintain Your Long Term Funding
You have a growing problem if you’ve been living on funding from financial partners for the long term. The problem is, how do you keep the funds coming?
And, how do you communicate personally with the over 800 people you’ve collected onto your newsletter list in your 20+ years in ministry? Is it possible to raise funds amongst those people while remaining in the middle of your ministry?
1 - Educate Your Audience
Are most of the people on your list actually familiar with your mission? Really familiar? Could they explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it to another friend without your help?
If so, great job!
If you’re more like the rest of us, they aren’t so familiar with what you’re accomplishing in your ministry, or they simply can’t remember. You might need to take a step back and help them look at the bigger picture.
To do this, begin communicating the basics of your ministry’s mission with your financial partners and newsletter readers all over again. Re-state your mission in a new or graphic way over email. Remind each of your financial partners about what made them interested in your mission in the first place.
2 - Emphasize The Impact
Utilize your regular newsletter to tell your financial partners a story of the impact they are making in the lives you minister to. You’re working together, that’s why we call it a financial partnership; so remind them regularly of the impact you’re having together among the people you’re serving.
Connecting the impact of the mission directly to the money given by your financial partners will lead you to a fundraising model of consistent, sustainable funding.
ONE EXAMPLE
We recently coached a missionary couple, the Davidsons, who have been on the mission field for 23 years, and served a unique role, counseling missionaries who need to leave the field and return “home” to their native country. This couple has served in this role in Germany, Sweden, and Thailand.
Discovering that their financial partners (list) are business-minded allowed the Davidsons to communicate in their recent newsletter that 50% of workers stay less than 5 years overseas and 71% leave for preventable reasons. Many of them are “too valuable to lose” with the language and culture skills they have learned.
Putting their ministry role in the business context of losing a valuable and trained employee allowed the Davidsons to connect to a world their financial partners could clearly understand.
Including the powerful statistic in their year end appeal newsletter, and telling a story (emphasizing the impact) of one missionary staying on the field with help of the Davidsons' ministry allowed their financial partners to realize just how necessary this particular ministry is to serving others.
The Davidsons gained $12k in one time donations, and $1k in monthly commitments. That’s a newsletter that will maintain funding!