Friends Asking Friends in Church Campaigns
Thinking Out Loud with Jana about Fundraising
This is a transcript of a conversation between myself and my friend, Jana Swenson, on January 9. We will continue our conversations over the next few weeks. First, let me introduce Jana:
With over two decades of experience, Jana equips and empowers congregations to fulfill their mission by strengthening their ability to fund both annual and capital needs. Drawing on her background as a pastor and development director, she brings a unique and invaluable perspective to her work as a fundraising consultant.
Her work is guided by a deep conviction: we were created in God’s image, and God is the ultimate model of generosity. Generosity, therefore, is at the core of who we are. When we step out in faith to share our resources, we experience a more profound sense of joy and fulfillment, as well as a stronger connection with one another.
Paul Hanson: I’m happy to introduce something new to this Substack series that I’ve called “To Be a Fundraiser.” My friend and colleague, Jana Swenson, is joining me today. We’ll be thinking through a theme that’s important to both of us, and to many of you as well.
But first, some background. Jana Swenson is well-known in church fundraising circles. Jana is a fine pastor; she has been a development director for a Bible camp; and she has many years of experience as a consultant, leading congregational fundraising campaigns. Jana, welcome! Glad to be with you in this.
Jana Swenson: Thanks. I’m excited to be here.
Paul: You started your own company in 2024: Jana Swenson Consulting Services. What types of organizations have you consulted with in the last couple years?
Jana: Well, congregations are certainly the primary type of organization, but I absolutely love camps— I’ve done a fair share of consulting with Bible camps. I’ve also had a chance to work with some nonprofits that maybe have some government funding but need additional financial support from donors. Also a couple of arts organizations.
Paul: I didn’t know that. That’s fantastic. So you’ve been the principal of your own consulting company for a couple years. And — here’s my announcement, folks — I’ve joined Jana as part of her fundraising team! For the last few months we have been working together on a couple projects.
Jana: Absolutely. Yes. And that’s been a real joy for me to have somebody to collaborate with and to talk through our methodologies, but also the context of the congregations and the work that we’re doing together there.
Paul: I feel the same way. It’s been really gratifying and fun to work with you. We both have our roots in congregational leadership; both of us have our CFRE (certified fund raising executive) certification. And so we have some credibility and some knowledge about best practices. You’ve been running campaigns, and I’ve been running around the country visiting major donors.
Jana, you and I have been talking about how we might integrate the best practices that nonprofit fundraising organizations have used into congregational fundraising. I think the word that you’ve used is: how do we “marry” those two things?
Jana: Yes, that is a very intentional word.
Paul: And like a marriage, there’s compromise.
Jana: There is, yes. You definitely can’t just kind of plop the best practices from the nonprofit sector onto congregations and get the same kinds of results.
Paul: You are, I think, differentiating your company by bringing in some of those practices. I don’t know if these things have been part of what most consultants offer to congregations. I think that’s a real strength of your company — and it also poses some additional challenges.
Jana: Absolutely.
“Because we want the church to have maximum results!”
Paul: Let’s talk about the first big difference between what I’ve been doing as a major gift officer and what you do as a church consultant: soliciting gifts and pledges.
In my world, asking for gifts has been done mainly by professional fundraisers. In congregational campaigns, on the other hand, the asking is done by volunteers who are visiting fellow church members to make their pledge or their gift.
Is it fair to say that’s one of the biggest challenges?
Jana: It is, yes. Certainly sometimes church staff members, especially pastors, are involved in inviting gifts, but not always! Because in some church cultures, that would be considered a taboo function of the pastor. But absolutely, the vast majority of people kind of inviting those gifts are volunteers and members asking members.
Paul: Volunteers, even pastors, are not full-time fundraisers who think about nothing else.
Jana: Yes, exactly. Or have the training and experience to know how to do it.
Paul: Say more about the training that you do with volunteers.
Jana: So backing up just a little bit…We know that the likelihood of a gift or pledge increases with some sort of personal conversation — that fact has been studied and researched. The same is true of gift size – it increases when donors receive a personal visit.
And so when we think about adopting that practice (in-person asking) in the church world, we can assume it is the case that if a personal conversation happens, the likelihood of the gift goes up, but also the amount of the gift goes up.
And so I became quickly enthralled with learning how to make this happen in a church setting. Because we want the church to have maximum results! So then it became all about equipping the volunteers to make the ask, and doing so in such a way that they could sit next to that person in worship the next Sunday morning and not feel awkward.
And that’s one of the biggest differences: these volunteers are living with each other. They have history with each other, they know each other’s families, they’ve walked with each other through hardship.
So to all of a sudden have a different kind of relationship around money and giving to the church can be very uncomfortable. So what we’ve discovered — and this is where you’ve been so helpful, Paul — is to make those conversations more about the shared passion and love for their church, and their shared desire to see this campaign succeed.
Equipping them then to close the deal, or whatever phrase you want to use to describe securing the gift, is where the rubber hits the road.
Paul: Speaking of hitting the road…When I was a major gift officer, I traveled a lot! And much of the travel was to get to know people. I was trying to develop the kind of personal relationships and shared understandings that, as you said, these volunteers in a church already have!
There are so many advantages to using volunteers in a congregation. As you said, they know and trust each other. They know the context. They don’t have to travel to see each other — they see each other around town, at church. And they have a genuine passion.
Plus, a crew of volunteers can get it done quickly. One fundraiser can’t see very many people in a month, but if you have a whole group of teams that are going out locally, they can make a lot of visits in a really short period of time. They could do more visits in a month than I could do in a year. And the follow-up is so natural.
Jana: Yeah. Very good point.
Paul: Volunteers can build a wave of momentum in…a month, two months? Is that the solicitation period in a typical congregational campaign?
Jana: Yeah, it really does depend on the number of giving units that you’re trying to get in front of and the number of volunteers that you actually have. But typically six to eight weeks from the first day they’re trained through when they’ve finished all of their follow-up and the leadership gift phase is completed.
Paul: You can really create a lot of momentum and enthusiasm.
What about leadership training? Do you see new leaders rising up in the congregation as a result of Catholic campaigns?
Jana: Yes, definitely. And I would also say more confident current leaders.
I think they discover that they’ve grown their skills, they understand that they learn a lot about the church and how the church functions being a part of a capital campaign. They have to integrate the why behind the campaign, which is always tied to mission and ministry. And so they grow in their appreciation, their understanding of, and their ability to articulate their church’s mission. They own it more.
They are true stakeholders by the end of the campaign process because they’re invested emotionally with their time and with their treasures. So there’s a lot of positive leadership momentum that comes out of a campaign process, especially those volunteers that we train to make these visits.
I think about Maggie, at one of the congregations you and I are working with. She is a relatively new member in a small church that has really established relationships. I see how she has had a different perspective on the people and on the congregation. She isn’t taking for granted all of the wonderful things about the congregation that maybe longtime members do.
And so she just infused so much energy and excitement, but also she brings an understanding of how major donors think, because she’s a major donor herself and has been able to articulate that for us.
Paul: There are so many advantages to using volunteers. There are also some challenges, I imagine. Like, quality control?
Jana: Yes. Yes, quality control. That’s always the biggest risk I feel like we take in a process like this, because we don’t really know how their visits went. In fact, sometimes we’re not exactly sure the visit was actually made. A lot of times it’s a phone call and the person being called says, “Oh, I don’t need a visit.” And at that point, it would be very easy for their visitor to say, “Okay,” and check them off the list.
And then others may do the visit, but they may spend all their time talking about the church and their love for the church and never get to the ask.
Paul: There are some things that are hard to teach when you’re doing a two-hour training of volunteers. One is how to be brave. When we’re nervous, we stick to small talk, and we don’t listen. I think most professional fundraisers would say you don’t talk your way into a gift, you listen your way into a gift.
Jana: Yes!
Paul: I’ve certainly found that to be true. It’s not so easy to teach these volunteers that you really want the person you’re visiting to do most of the talking.
Jana: Yeah. And that you ask open-ended questions. We’re more used to asking questions that can be answered with a yes or no, but that doesn’t accomplish the goal of engaging. In our training we have a little script with two or three questions that are open-ended, to engage the person that they’re visiting. So that person does the talking.
You spend a lot more time curating a unique gift chart for each congregation.
Paul: What about sending volunteers to ask for a specific gift amount? Does that work in congregations, or do you steer clear of that?
Jana: It can work in the right circumstances, but generally speaking I’d say the vast majority of the volunteers that get recruited in these roles are not going to be comfortable, and actually just won’t use a number.
So then we want to equip them with some phrases that they can use such as, “Can you see yourself in the top third of the gift chart?” That gift chart becomes a really important tool for them to use because you can ask some numbers questions without having to use the numbers, if they both have the gift chart in front of them.
Paul: In other words, you could point at the number without having to say the number.
Jana: Exactly. The two phrases we use the most are, “Can you see yourself in the top two tiers of the gift chart?” or “Can you see yourself being the lead donor of this campaign?”
Paul: So let’s get into the gift chart, Jana. In the old days of congregational campaigns, a gift chart was really based solely on the financial goal. If you need to raise a million, you need one gift of this amount, and three at that amount, and five… The chart would look the same for every campaign.
That’s not what you do. I know that you spend a lot more time curating a unique gift chart for each congregation. Can you say more about that?
Jana: Yes. And that’s something that I learned when I worked with Brenda Moore, with Brenda Moore and Associates, because she was a master at this. Brenda really taught me how to utilize both giving history to the church itself, but also the wealth screening tools to kind of, again, marry their giving patterns with their capacity. So if they are consistent givers who have a history of increasing their giving to the church over the last several years, and then the wealth screening tool tells us that they have a higher capacity to make a large commitment, then we know that those are prime prospects for the top level of the gift chart.
If they are regular givers but don’t have the capacity, those are our really good legacy giving candidates. And so that’s an opportunity for us to invite them to start thinking about a legacy gift while they’re making their campaign gift. A legacy gift can be a nice gift to the campaign.
Paul: If any of our audience doesn’t understand wealth screening, it’s the use of publicly available data. It looks at gifts that a donor has made to other places. It includes real estate data. Corporate reports. Other key indicators of someone’s giving capacity.
Wealth screening is not something that congregations have ever done. Jana, I imagine that there’s discomfort with sharing gift records and talking about people’s capacity.
Jana: Absolutely. Absolutely. There are a lot of challenges and understandable concerns about using a wealth screening tool in a congregation, largely because they’re all in relationship with each other. Whereas in a regular nonprofit, the donors don’t usually have a relationship with one another, or they do with a couple of other people, but they’re not a community.
Paul: The paradox is that these are the same people. The people that I might be calling on from a nonprofit expect to have their giving known by me. The same individuals would have different expectations in their congregational context.
We’re going to dedicate our whole next dialogue to wealth screening and the gift chart, because it’s so important for setting the right goal and for resourcing volunteers. You need to have the right kind of gift chart so that they can use that in their asking.
Well, thank you, Jana, for this conversation. I look forward to the next one!
Jana: Likewise. Thanks for having me.
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