What Could We Fund with a Capital Campaign?
A needs assessment helps you map out the top priorities that could be funded by a capital campaign.
A successful capital campaign is rooted in a clear understanding of your church's needs and God’s call on the congregation. It's not just about building a bigger building or adding a new program; it's about addressing the specific needs of your congregation and community.
Mapping out the needs for your campaign
A Comprehensive Needs Assessment
Just like getting a rendering for a new building, a needs assessment helps you see what the footprint of your campaign might look like. You can do this informally among the leaders and members of the church or hire a coach/consultant to guide the process. In really big projects, you might do an informal internal assessment and then engage a coach/consultant to validate the results.
To accurately assess your church's needs, consider the following steps:
Involve Your Leadership Team:
Brainstorming Session: Gather your leadership team to discuss potential needs.
SWOT Analysis: Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify internal and external factors affecting your 1 church.
Visioning Exercise: Have a visioning session to discuss the church's long-term goals and how a capital campaign can help achieve them.
Seek Input from Church Groups:
Ministry Leaders: Consult with leaders of various ministries to understand their specific needs.
Congregation Surveys: Conduct surveys to gather feedback from your congregation about their priorities and concerns.
Engage the Community:
Community Surveys: Distribute surveys to your neighbors and local businesses to understand their needs and how your church can serve them better.
Community Forums: Host community forums to discuss local issues and how your church can contribute to solutions.
Prayerful Reflection:
Prayer Meetings: Dedicate specific prayer times to seek God's guidance and direction.
Bible Study: Study biblical passages related to stewardship, generosity, and kingdom building.
Prioritizing Needs and Setting Goals
Once you've identified your church's needs, it's time to prioritize them and set realistic campaign goals. Here are some tips:
Align with Your Mission: Ensure that your campaign goals align with your church's mission and vision.
Set Clear and Measurable Goals: Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.
Prioritize Needs: Rank your needs based on their urgency and impact.
Be Realistic: Set achievable goals that are both ambitious and realistic.
Involve Your Congregation: Share your vision and goals with your congregation and seek their input and support.
By carefully identifying and prioritizing your church's needs, you can create a compelling case for a capital campaign that resonates with your congregation and community. Remember, the most successful campaigns are those that address real needs and inspire people to give generously.
It’s Always the Boiler!
The Case for Support is a document that explains the funding priorities of a church capital campaign. It is a story and a vision for God’s call for a congregation in terms of ministry and stewardship.
The first document you will write for your campaign is called the Case for Support. It actually makes a case for supporting the project or projects that are a part of the capital campaign. At this point, it is really a simple leadership exercise. It might be only a paragraph that answers, “What are we raising money for?”
The Case is the foundational document of the campaign. Not only is it the first thing you write, but you will refer to it frequently during the campaign to keep your work and results focused. It will evolve in a relatively short period of time as well. Through a process of discernment and testing, the document expands to include information about the history of the church and the vision of where the congregation is called to go. It is the articulation of why we are embarking on a journey that will consume significant time, resources, energy, money, and bandwidth that are usually wholly devoted to the ministry of the church. It casts a vision for how ministry and the congregation will be changed when this experience is over. The Case is simple but quite hard to write and it should be. It is hard to build consensus around and that is also healthy! The pain of creating it is growth and pays dividends quickly for the staff, leadership, and members of the congregation.
As the leadership team of the church starts down this road of discerning a campaign, coming up with a short paragraph of your Case will give you a boost as you reach out to potential partners like consultants, architects, or denominational structures.
After you hire a consultant or coach, you will go through a process that tests, strengthens, and expands your Case. I describe that later in the text. For this early phase of discernment, you will learn quite a bit by crafting something on your own. You can test it through prayer and conversation to check the fidelity of your Case against the call of the congregation and the campaign.
It’s Always the Boiler
I think my first several campaigns all began with a boiler going out! Some of my younger colleagues scarcely know what a boiler is, but in many churches, it was the main source of heat for the campus, and in a midwestern church, it was a critical element of success in the winter! Older churches (where I primarily served in my early days) tend to have more mechanical issues than newer and more efficient physical plants. My ministry is rooted in the midwest where boilers are a staple part of the mechanical anatomy of a church operation. If we were lucky, they would go out before the winter season and there would be time for repairs. However, boilers that crashed in the winter tended to raise money faster! Maybe that was the better path! The visceral and visible connection of this part of the church made it easier for people to give. It was something someone could see (and feel when it didn’t work) and that motivates donors.
Generally, when a boiler would fail, it would give church leadership an opportunity to look at other physical plant issues that could be addressed. This was a holy moment to consider ways to make the place we worshipped and learned to be more welcoming, accessible, and efficient. In a number of my previous campaigns, if it weren’t for a failed boiler, the church would not be the updated space it is today with new ministries that were created in the midst of that discernment.
Failing mechanical components were the catalyst to dream bigger. One mentor of mine often shared that the life of the church is so often focused on getting from one Sunday to the next that we rarely have time to consider the larger picture of the vision of our ministry. These moments forced us to pause and dream bigger about our mission and service. While a busted boiler might be the genesis of a campaign, it became the springboard for larger conversations that set the stage for growth, deepened faith, and greater generosity in the congregation.
Whether it is a boiler that goes out, a roof that needs to be repaired, or intermittent flooding in the basement, I have found these physical plant moments have been a path to expansions of ministry and outreach in ways that might not have been a priority if not for a suddenly cold winter morning in a sanctuary full of God’s people.
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