We’ve all heard myths about fundraising.  These often lead us to do the exact opposite of what we should be doing to raise money.  We’ll be running a twelve part series de-bunking fundraising myths to take a close look at these false assumptions about giving.

This is the fifth in the series and we will run one each month (if you can’t wait to a year to read all of them you can purchase the book Beyond Fundraising: A Complete Guide to Congregational Stewardship and read them in Chapter 1: The Spiritual Roots of Stewardship). You may have seen the commercials for Bing about search engine overload, and we may feel that way sometimes but it doesn’t necessarily mean that congregants don’t want to know where their money is going.

As always, we encourage you to leave comments.

Fundraising Myth #5

Myth: Because many people are suffering from information overload, they do not want to know how the congregation is using their contributions.

Truth: May people, although overwhelmed with information in their daily lives, are also well educated and a bit skeptical. They are less likely than previous generations to have blind faith that the congregation is using their money wisely. They want to know that their contributions are making a difference, and they are interested in the facts and figures as well as the narrative that explains the ways that their financial gifts are being used. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they want to see long columns of numbers as found in a detailed line-item budget.)