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Stop us if this sounds familiar...
Your diocesan development office has been doing the same thing, year after year. You produce a direct mail appeal, host a gala and a golf outing, and you run some advertisements in the diocesan newspaper to promote your legacy society. Sometimes you get an unexpected estate gift and it’s the highlight of your month.
You started a foundation, but it seems like everyone wants to spend their time talking about board structure and investment policies, and nobody wants to help you fundraise.
Your annual appeal hits its goal, but not by much. A handful of pastors really support what you're doing, and you thank God for them every day. Most of the other pastors go along with the program but they’re already stretched thin and none of them enjoy asking for money. You suspect that nobody even watches that video you worked so hard to produce.
You are increasingly reliant on a handful of donors who are getting older. At first, you were excited to watch your average gift size increase each year. But now you’re worried it says more about your shrinking pool of donors than it does about the health of your development program.
Since 2009, diocesan annual appeals have seen a dramatic decline in participation.
Your diocese offers online giving, but it hasn’t really taken off. The process is clunky. When you first set it up, the finance office required you to ask for way more information than what is necessary to process a gift. So now the donation form would be a mile long if you ever printed it out. Only the heartiest donors make it through all the way to the end. They must really want those credit card points.
Your database is okay. Well, not really okay, but it works and you’re making do. You lie awake at night worried that your database administrator will find a better paying job at a hospital or university and then you’ll have to try and find someone new who really knows how to use Blackbaud. You wish there was a way you can get your parish data to sync with your diocesan database.
You’ve got software companies trying to sell you on new cloud-based services, mobile apps and text-to-give programs. Some of them even sound promising, but you know you don’t have the time or resources to implement new things. Even if you bought the most amazing new software in the world, who in your office is going to run it?
You want to reach new donors and younger donors because you know it will help the diocese in the long run. But it’s hard to make that a priority when a new fundraising emergency pops up every other week. You’re tired of being reactive and you wish you could hit the pause button and just get ahead of things for once. You’ve got a list of creative ideas built up from conferences and conversations with your peers, but you never have the time or resources to put them into action.
You rely on capital campaigns more than you’d like. And you’re probably due to start the next one soon… but with the fundraising environment being what it is, you’re reluctant to go out to all the parishes and ask for gifts to support the diocese.
There is a better way.
PSG was built to help diocesan development offices adapt and thrive in this new, digital world. Not by selling you a new software program (what you have is probably fine) or by promising you quick fixes (they don’t really exist). Instead, we offer something you really need – solutions that work and the staff to implement them.
Our digital fundraising experts work with select dioceses, on an annual basis, to upgrade and modernize their programs.
We help our diocesan clients supplement their direct mail appeals with automated email campaigns, custom donation pages, targeted social media posts and a strategy to convert one-time donors into monthly givers. We test, measure and optimize to convert readers into visitors and visitors into donors.
Over time, and with some shared effort, our clients find themselves the proud new owners of a modern, data-driven development program full of recurring, monthly givers.
Let's build a more effective program to support the important ministries of your diocese. There's no time to lose.