Practical Ideas to Take Your Offering to the Next Level

Ideas to take your offerings to the next level – Since even my stellar offering talks can become routine, causing members to tune you out, let me give you some ideas on how to take your talks to the next level.

You must keep changing what you do during the offering time to keep it from becoming stale and thus ineffective. Take my ideas and personalize them for your church. First start by …

Connecting the dots – To gain dollars from your donors, you must connect for them how their gift fuels missions and ministry. I call that connecting the dots. Your offering time is the key to teaching the value and impact of giving. The goal should be to make people want to give rather than guilting them into giving. How do you accomplish this? Showing and telling your story of life change which thus creates in people a desire to give willingly to support what your church is doing!

Try these practical ideas for your offering talks.

Use Video – Many of my clients already use video loops for announcements. Why not use that approach for the offering? For instance, while you are talking about VBS on the screens, you could be showing shots from last year’s VBS or shots of your kids in action. Non-profits use shots of kids all the time to tug at donors’ hearts. Why do they do that? It works!

You could also video the whole offering talk. Today it is so easy to do. Just take your smartphone, point and click, and you can make your own videos. While the content quality will not rival the networks, what makes it appealing is that it is local. People love to see people they know on video. Show and tell what you are doing, and the offering plate will fill up!

Interviews – Even churches without screens or projectors can take their offerings up a notch by using the interview process. Let’s take VBS again. Let’s say, a few weeks before you launch VBS, you have your director come to the platform, and you interview her. Tell her to look at you, not the crowd. Then ask questions about VBS. When is it? How many kids are you expecting? How many of them will come from outside the church? How many decisions do you typically see in VBS? Thank her and then say, “We can hold our VBS only because of your generosity. So, as worship through today’s offering, I want you to know that your generosity funds VBS; so, please give as God directs.” These are two easy ideas of how to better tell your story.

Preview, Report, and Thank – My advice is to think through the entire month or season. Each week pick one specific mission or ministry endeavor to focus upon. Challenge your team to think of creative and effective ways to tell the story and then ask people to support that work. You can also build an offering talk reporting on the success of missions and ministry initiatives. In the Church, we do a poor job of blowing our horn and praising God for what was accomplished. Let members know how their gifts helped change lives. Then thank them for the fact that their generosity allowed that to happen.

Start thinking and planning NOW what each of your offering talks will be about, and you will have greater success in being fully funded.