It’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Are you in that spot right now?
How many meetings are scheduled for your upcoming week? I’m talking face to face meetings. Are you finding it harder and harder to fill time slots intended for in person touches?
The end of year crunch will be here before you know it, and that’s when I hear more and more people lament how many people haven’t yet given to their ministry or complaints as leaders decide the gifts given were not enough or as great as originally expected.
I want to challenge you and encourage you by changing how you view these dilemmas.
First, let’s look at the meetings and how your calendar is possibly a bit empty. Let’s say you’ve reached out to twenty people. You’ve penciled some in; others you’re waiting to hear back from and wish they’d just call you ready. You’re annoyed.
Perhaps you need to consider reaching out to more than twenty people?
For instance, if you doubled the number of people you reach out to schedule, you double your result of the number of people to schedule. A problem with getting people scheduled usually isn’t the fact that people aren’t getting back to you. That is always going to be a challenge. It usually has much more to do with the effort that is being put into scheduling.
Second, I want to address the fiscal frustration – giving and deadlines. I understand that. I really do. The challenge is you can’t fixate on the financial goal because unfortunately you can’t control whether or not people are going to give and if so, how much they are going to give, and when they are going to give. You can’t control any of that.
In the work of growing significant giving, all you can really control is this: Are you actually sharing the plan with people and asking them to give?
To help you self-evaluate a little bit and think about your focus, the first question I want you to ask yourself is: Do you actually have a plan that you believe will work to fund and fuel your organization going forward? Do you have a plan that you can articulate?
That is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question, right.
If you have a plan that you believe in and that you believe will work, and that, if funded, is going to impact people then the next question is: How many people have you actually talked to in the past three months about that plan and asked them to be thinking about their giving?
That is a number. It is okay if you don’t know exactly but hopefully you know exactly how many people are on your follow-up list. Now, how many have you actually talked to in the past three months and shared that plan with them?
Feeling overwhelmed is human …but unnecessary.
I encourage you to take this advice to heart and reevaluate where you’re placing yourself in your standing with donors as the end of the year approaches. Take these small steps to make a big difference in your mental space and ministry’s impact!
As you try to grow the number of face to face meetings you have on your calendar, check out our first meetings tool!