Capital Campaign Boot Camp

If you keep doing what you have always done, you will not get what you always got. That’s one of my Brooks Mantras for Stewardship. As we entered the 21st century, it dawned on me that our methods for raising capital dollars were antiquated and becoming increasingly ineffective. The classic approach to capital campaigns was to organize various teams with specific tasks that required the team to recruit and enlist volunteers to staff all teams. The theory was that the more people involved in the campaign, the more money you would raise. Like many things in the stewardship industry, we never checked to see if that was true. If companies had done the extensive data research we do on all our clients, they would have known this wasn’t true.

Welcome to the Capital Campaign Boot Camp edition of The Stewardship Coach! When you think of boot camp, many images are conjured up, especially if you served in the military. The military boot camp is an intensive training experience that teaches future warriors how to defend our nation. The term boot camp is now being used for any training. I’ve seen coding boot camps that teach you how to code. You may have seen fitness boot camps that utilize a compressed few weeks of training to get a person in top shape. In this edition of the Coach, I will share the basics of a capital campaign. With my coaching, you might not be able to do a one-armed push-up, but you can certainly raise more money. The first basic you must understand is the difference between programs and principles.

A few years ago, a competitor wrote a short article entitled “The Scriptural Approach to Raising Funds in Churches.” Here is what my competitor wrote to start his article. “When raising funds in churches, it is important to raise them with the scriptural approach.” I agree! Yet the question is, what constitutes a scriptural approach? He clarifies that by saying, “The scriptural approach to raising major funds is to prepare the heart first with solid scriptural teachings, then resolving attitude and stewardship issues, engaging people in meaningful service on one of the campaign teams, incorporating vision, motivation, and challenge, and then encouraging them to give with willing hearts. Asking for money without preparing the heart first is repulsive.” I agree that we must prepare our hearts first. The question is, how best can we do that?

Let me say right up front: I like this guy. He is a deeply spiritual man who has helped many churches raise the funds they need over the years. He and I have talked twice about my purchasing his company as he neared retirement. Our differing views of the capital campaign approach stopped us in our negotiations. This owner passionately believes that his process, building teams, is the only true biblical campaign in our industry. He is wrong.

I see a difference between programs and principles; he has made his program a principle. Programs and teams don’t raise dollars. An impactful and well-communicated God-given vision raises dollars. How that rolls out in your church depends upon your church’s background. Here are some realities that blow away the team concept.

A few families in your church will give the majority of what is given. On average, 15% of your donors give as much as 90% of all that is given in a capital campaign. This has always been how campaigns worked and will continue to be how they work. Putting your top-end donors on a team will not assure a major commitment. Answering their questions and casting a compelling vision will!

People are too busy to sign up for another team. Recently, in a church that told us they wanted teams, we ran into trouble finding people to serve. Everyone is on board with what the church is doing. Yet the church found that its members are time-stressed. Most have something to attend almost every night of the week. They have little interest in another night at the church. There are two commodities in our day: time and money. Your campaign must reflect this reality.

Campaigns that have teams are staffed by leaders already on multiple teams. Think about it. When you have something important in your church you want to be done, who do you turn to? You turn to those trusted workers who have proven track records. While you might want some new blood in service when trying to have a successful campaign, you won’t go to the B team for help. What you end up doing with multiple teams is wearing your already exhausted workers to death. This could be one reason so many people hate capital campaigns.

So, your approach isn’t scriptural if you don’t have people serving on campaign teams? I might have missed it, but where in the Bible do you find committees and teams listed when they took up offerings to build the Tabernacle? This is one of the biggest stretches I have seen in my industry to defend how we have always done things.

Let’s follow David’s example! So, if you want to have a scriptural capital campaign, why not follow the way David raised funds for the building of the temple? In the closing chapters of I Chronicles, we find that story. How did David raise the needed funds?

It started with a God-given vision. “I had it in my heart,” David told the leaders of Israel. God put that into David’s heart. His vision had to be refined so that Solomon would build the temple, but David’s original vision started the process. Crafting and articulating your God-given vision is essential to raising funds. My next Coach will share how to do this.

David’s leaders bought into the vision and gave. I Chronicles 29:6 records that after David shared his vision and commitment, “They gave toward the work.” Leaders always lead the way. Remember, as much as 90% of what will be raised will come from your existing leaders. You must know how to get them solidly on board.

The rest gave as they saw the leaders give. “The people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders,” is what I Chronicles 29: 9 says. Then they gave. This is a scriptural approach to raising funds.

The lesson for us is to be careful about making our preferences of how we like to do something the same as a principle from Scripture. The truth of the matter is there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the Bible doesn’t give us a plan or identify a process of how to raise capital funds.

A few years after I started working in the stewardship industry, I started asking why. I looked at every element of a capital campaign and, like a three-year-old, I asked, “Why do we do this?” The answer I received more often than not was because that is the way we have always done it! The more the stewardship industry dug in to defend 1980 methods, the more I began to see the need for a better way. Times have changed and how we do capital campaigns has changed as well.

The question you should be asking is, “Does the campaign process we are running match the culture, character, and makeup of our 21st-century church?” It’s time to stop using 1980 strategies in the 21st century because if you keep doing what you have always done, you will not get what you always got. Let’s change how we go about raising funds.

¹
Mark Brooks – The Stewardship Coach
mark@acts17generosity.com

OnlineGiving.org, the leading online giving processor in America, sponsors my writing. Find out more about their services at https://www.onlinegiving.org/.