FREE Guide: Budget Today for Tomorrow’s Growth

Is your church’s budget more of a stumbling block than a stepping stone to future growth? Without a budget that builds growth into your plan, your vision of engaging new people and new communities won’t happen. 

Frankly, a budget that isn’t aligned with your church’s vision is a recipe for missed opportunities and stalled growth. 

That’s why we put together Budgeting Today for Tomorrow’s Church Growth, a new free guide designed to help you create the budget you need. 

After putting into practice the insights from this guide, you’ll be able to:

• Build a budget that turns your vision into reality.
• Strategically allocate resources for maximum ministry impact.  
• Navigate an uncertain economy with confidence. 

Get a simple, step-by-step guide to creating a memorable church getaway.

Are you struggling to plan a fall retreat that truly engages your congregation? You’re certainly not alone.

Imagine spending countless hours planning a retreat only to have very few people show up.

Or picture this: you arrive at the venue for the retreat and everything is a complete mess.

Or you return from your retreat and realize you didn’t achieve any of your goals.

Our new FREE guide, Season of Renewal: Creating Impactful Fall Retreats for Your Church, can help you create an unforgettable Fall retreat minus all the drama. In this guide, you’ll learn to:

• Define your retreat goals so you can accomplish what you’ve set out to do through the retreat.
• Put together an all-star volunteer team.
• Get the word out about your plans so more people attend.

In the Appendix of this guide, you’ll also find an assortment of planning worksheets to help you do everything from budgeting to picking a venue to evaluating your retreat once you’re done.

Talking about stewardship can be tough for church leaders. Everyone feels some level of discomfort when discussing money. To help you and other leaders with this important topic, we partnered with Vanco to share with you a detailed guide that covers everything you need to know to improve financial stewardship, including…

• 8 rules of financial stewardship every church should know.
• 100+ great church fundraising ideas.
• 36 giving messages leaders can use to inspire greater generosity.
• 11 revenue sources churches shouldn’t ignore and how to use each one to generate funds.
• 17 key components for creating the perfect stewardship plan.

Are you ready for your church’s best fall yet?

September and October may be the two most important months of your church year. If your church is like most, your summer has been tough. You’ve had lower attendance, lower giving, and lower volunteer involvement. 

That makes the fall season critical. As school begins and family re-establish schedules, it’s important they make room in their schedule for church activities.   

You’ll need the right playbook to make that happen. Our new free guide, The Fall Church Communications Playbook: The Ultimate Guide to Re-Engaging Your Church Family is designed to help churches like your create a communications plan to help you reconnect with your church family this fall.

This guide helps you:

• Create a compelling message.
• Strike the right tone for your communications.
• Develop a campaign that grabs the attention of congregants. 

Uncover the secrets of saving time and stress in your church’s accounting processes.

Church accounting keeps growing more and more complex. You need to manage multiple designated funds, each with their own specific donor restrictions. Annually, you must create clear and detailed donation receipts for your donors’ tax documentation.

All of this complexity often leads to errors and inefficiencies that drag you away from the mission God has given your church.    

That’s why we created our new FREE guide Simplified Accounting: A Church Guide to Financial Clarity and Compliance. This guide will take you step-by-step through how you can simplify some of your most complex church accounting tasks.

When you apply what you learn in this guide, you’ll:

• Cut time from your accounting processes so you can invest your time in your church’s core ministry functions.
• Relieve stress from overworked staff and volunteers.
• Reduce costly errors in your church’s financial management. 

As summer nears so does a familiar challenge for churches—declining involvement. Even the most effective churches see declines in attendance, small group involvement, giving, and more. Members head off on vacation. Plus, they often want to spend more time outside and less time inside a church building. 

This isn’t just a frequently shared myth. Research shows attendance during the summer typically drops by 20%. Some churches, including those in college towns, see an even bigger decline.

But the summer slump isn’t just about numbers. It’s about missed opportunities. When engagement drops, relationships don’t get built, marriages aren’t saved, and brokenness doesn’t get healed.  

And your church’s momentum stalls—maybe permanently.

But what if we told you the summer slump was avoidable?

In our new free guide, 7 Habits of Highly Engaged Churches in the Summer, we’ll introduce you to the habits that drive engagement during the warm months of the year and beyond. This guide provides:

• Summer-specific strategies for growing (not merely steady) involvement.
  
  
• Engagement ideas for churches of all sizes.
  
  
• Involvement strategies that bring together every key area of your church.

Summer is a time of sunshine, vacations, trips, and fun. Unfortunately, for many churches like yours, it is also a time of decreased attendance and engagement as so many are out of town. This means your tithes take a hit as seats are empty, and fewer envelopes are being dropped in the offering plate each week.

So how can you avoid the dreaded summer slump while your members are enjoying their time away?

Say Goodbye to Disjointed Communications Forever

Free step-by-step guide to creating a church communications plan

Are you tired of haphazard communication frustrating your church’s messaging? Does it seem like your church’s messages always get misunderstood?

In today’s world, effective church communication is more important than ever. But it’s tough to keep the messages clear with so much going on. That often means your church mission gets blurred for the people who need to hear it the most. 

That’s why every church needs a communications plan. 

To help, we’ve put together a new FREE guide, Crafting Your Church’s Communications Plan: A Step-by-Step Blueprint to Tell Your Story Better, to help you create a cohesive strategy to make your church’s messaging better. 

After you implement the strategies in this guide, your church will be prepared to:

• Tell clear and cohesive stories about what God is doing through your church.
  
  
• Engage congregants with consistent messages that communicate with both your congregants and community.
  
  
• Focus your communications resources on the messages that matter most to your church and the audiences you’re trying to reach. 

Your church mission matters to your community and the world around you. Start building a communication plan that moves your mission forward rather than setting it back.

Free Guide: Get the Most From Your Church Tech Budget

Say goodbye to surprising church tech costs that blow up your budget

Is your church struggling to budget for unpredictable IT costs? 

Technology has become a critical part of how we reach people in today’s world. But it’s famously tough to budget for IT. Too many churches are letting IT surprises eat into the resources meant for core ministry objectives. 

Our new guide can help. In The Hidden Costs of Your Church’s Digital Infrastructure, you’ll learn the surprising secret to cutting out the costs that kill your church’s IT budget. 

You’ll discover:

• The costs most church leaders forget about when planning an IT budget. 
• A solution to your unpredictable tech budget. 
• How churches like yours are finding unique partnerships that help them leverage technology for future ministry growth.