Matthew 6:21 says, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." So, one sign of how much an individual or family treasures your church is their giving.
There are many reasons people stop giving to your church. These include:
- Loss of a job.
- An accident or serious illness.
- A job change.
- A geographical move.
- Frustration with church leadership.
- Conflict with others in the church.
- Personal or family issues that they feel ashamed of.
- Disengaged. No longer attend.
The pastoral calling is a nudge by the spirit of God to bring the love of God and the peace of God to the chaos of human experience. Often times the hardest part of pastoral care is becoming aware of the chaos people are experiencing. An effective database can help by providing a report on significant changes in giving patterns. Even better is automating that report to create an email notification of that change. Here's how to do that.
Determine what a change in giving looks like. (Conversation or whiteboarding.) I typically suggest that someone who gave 9 or more times between 12 and 3 months ago, but nothing since could be considered a lapsed giver worthy of pastoral staff awareness.
Create a lapsed givers group. (Click Groups in the Create Card.) You will put all current lapsed givers into this group and use it as your dashboard for pastoral follow-up if you choose.
Run a "catch-up" report. This report will catch you up with all your current lapsed givers. It helps you establish a baseline from which to build. This is important beacause you could have givers who last gave up to 9 or 10 months ago if they were weekly givers. Here's how to create this report in Churchteams:
- Reports > Members > Add People to A Group.
- Select your Lapsed Givers group.
- Open up Filters > Contributions.
- Choose families, and 12 to 3 months ago.
- Choose families, 9 to 90 contributions, and 12 to 3 months ago.
- Run the report.
- Add people to the group.
Create a workflow. (Click Workflows in the Create Card.) These are the steps you want to take to follow up a lapsed giver on an ongoing basis. A notification to a pastor is certainly a good step. Be sure to add the expectation that the pastor will note their interaction in the database with a follow-up assignment or reminder. You could add an email or text that has an invitation to respond back with a personal update on the family.
Create a "work-horse" report. This report will run every week to notify the pastor those who gave 9 or more times 12 to 3 months ago with their last donation exactly 3 months ago.
- Reports > Communication > Add People to Workflow.
- Choose the workflow created above.
- Open up Filters > Contributions.
- Choose families, and the week ending 3 months ago.
- Choose families, 9 to 90 contributions, and 12 to 3 months ago.
- Run the report to get a feel for who is involved.
- Click "Display" to review your list of people.
- If it looks good click "Add to Saved Reports" then make the date ranges dynamic.
- "Add to workflow" will start the workflow steps.
Schedule the Saved Report. This step automates the process. Once you schedule the report, it will run every week to add the right people into your workflow. Simply click Reports > Scheduled Reports to select the Saved Report, Schedule it, and add someone to notify that the report ran.
