How to Make a Church Giving Appeal During COVID

Now that many churches have transitioned to a partially virtual model for good, best practices for streaming video have begun to transform into best practices for the Sunday service production.

One of the moments during the church service COVID’s digital revolution has changed is the church offering.

How can you make a good faith appeal to isolated and struggling people to give to your church?

In this article, we are going to survey the multiple strategies you can employ to make a strong giving appeal that brings your church together during one of the darkest seasons your community has likely known.

1. Document the church’s work

People are eager to be mobilized during this season.

When you share the good work you are doing with the church, it makes them excited to participate in a purposeful work during a season that feels like a disjointed mixture of urgency and stagnancy.

When you allow people to visually experience the effect their tithes and offerings have on your community, they will be inspired to give. Perhaps not everyone will give — but it makes the giving appeal far easier, and you’ll leave people eager to see the next video in church that documents how God is making an impact through their financial offering.

2. Present analytics of the church’s impact

In an age of conspiracy theories, people have become very good at sifting through large amounts of data in order to uncover the truth.

While you don’t want to present a dry and cluttered presentation of boring data points, you do want to hunt down the most impressive numbers your church is throwing on the board in any area—any place of growth, opportunity, or motion—and show your church where that movement is.

Like a moth to the flame, they will be effortlessly drawn to that growth, that opportunity, that motion.

3. Collect personal stories (video or written)

This is another version of documenting the work the church is doing, but this version of media is very important. In a season in which face-to-face contact is very minimal, and people are connected more than ever to the global world rather than their local world, a testimonial video from someone in your church will warm the hearts of those who are wearied by this lockdown.

Ideally, your video will highlight someone who has benefited from the church’s diaconal ministry, as people have the strongest empathic impulses toward people in physical or financial suffering.

Ask these congregants to share how God has been working in their lives through the church during COVID, and ask them to invite others to participate in the community even more deeply during the lockdown. This will create a social context in which the normalization of giving is more easily implemented at a cultural level because the larger volume of buy-in for the giving practice will generate smoother introduction of the expectation to give.

4. Make giving appeals often

This is the part most pastors struggle with.

It makes sense, that when pastors interact with their parishioners on a daily basis, it can sometimes feel awkward to ask them to give.

However, if you follow the steps above, making asks will be easy. People will feel a sense of camaraderie in the air and jump on board to help out those in need.

Over to you

Use these strategies to craft a highly engaging and respectful giving appeal for your church during this new season of church life in which the digital has merged with the personal.

Most pastors will feel awkward doing church in this new way, but the more quickly you can become comfortable in this new format, the more quickly will your congregation become comfortable, responsive, and delighted by the new aspect of your production that serves those who cannot be physically present, as much as they wish they could.