The UUA has a group of nine stewardship consultants who help congregations with annual budget drives, strategic planning (in preparation for a capital campaign) capital campaigns, and endowment program development.

These consultants are all UU lay leaders from around the country, who have received rigorous training.

There are some specific situations in which a stewardship consultant can be helpful to your congregation. Consider hiring a consultant when:

• The congregation lacks a clear vision and is without a consensus about direction.
• The congregation needs a fresh perspective from an external, impartial expert.
• You need help shifting from a myth of scarcity to the reality of abundance.
• You want to focus on broadly defined stewardship, instead of a narrow focus on fundraising.
• You would like to implement FORTH, a stewardship development program.
• You would like to be come a FORTH Partner congregation.
• Leaders understand that money spent on a consultant can be a wise investment.
• Recently, few congregants have been willing to work on an annual budget drive.
• Even fewer have been willing to assume a stewardship leadership role.
• The congregation has someone with fundraising experience who is willing to lead an annual budget drive, but their previous efforts have not been very successful.
• There is conflict about which fundraising technique to use.
• A proposed capital campaign project is too big to rely totally on volunteers.
• A capital campaign project has been proposed, and a consultant is needed to determine how much money can be expected from congregants.
• There is no active planned giving program.
• There is no endowment fund, or the existing fund is moribund.
• The congregation has a small endowment fund that represents less than three times the annual operating budget.