We've recently finished a capital campaign where we were aiming to raise $2 million for a new cafe and expanded foyer space at our church. We raised $1.3 million in the first three weeks. Then finished raising the remaining money needed within the year.
Before we kicked off the campaign I did a lot of research. I asked capital campaign specialists questions and read blogs of those who had done campaigns before. I also read much wider than just church communications specialists as I wanted to get a holistic view of how a campaign should work.
Below are the 7 useful (I hope!) church capital campaign ideas:
- (My idea) Tell stories of life change at your church. Connect your building campaign back to your mission and vision. It's not about a building, but about the transformed lives of the people that will use it.
- The Change Group provide excellent free videos about how to preach about the topic of money and what success looks like in a capital campaign. Casey Graham also gives you three strategies on how to deal with high capacity givers and how you can double your online giving.
- Tony Morgan writes about five mistakes churches make with building campaigns.
- Tim Schraeder has written two excellent posts on rethinking church capital campaigns (Part 1, Part 2).
- Kem Meyer will help you discover the objective of your capital campaign. She also gives some ideas on how to theme a capital campaign.
- Kevin D Hendricks from Church Marketing Sucks writes about why churches should align their capital campaign to their mission through their communications.
- Tim Avery gives some great advice on why strategy matters for capital campaigns.
What ideas do you have you?
What worked or didn't work?
If you had your time again would you do anything differently?
I'll be writing more about this again in the near future. Is there anything else you would like me to talk about?
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