Brigada Today
05 Mar 2004
+ Fund raising for "Repeater short term mission trips"
- The question asked was, "HOW DO YOU FUND REPEAT TRIPS? -- Southway Community Church now has several small short term mission teams (Music development and TEFL) that minister out of country several times each per year. Because these teams involve the same people each time and therefore the same donors, they are finding that the funding tends to drop off. Does your church have this kind of repeat mission trip? How do you fund them?"
- The following responses are given without attribution because I didn't ask for permission to use names. None of the following ideas are mine, I only edited and arranged them.
Kevin Paszalek Southway
Community Church
Houston, Texas USA
pastor at southway.org (replace the word "at" with the @ sign and remove the space on either side)
+ Cost cutting
- Have you considered having fewer trips per year, but each trip be longer duration? I'm sure a majority of the cost is airfares.
+ Participants pay some proportion
- If a person wants to go on a Short Term Mission trip he (or she) must be approved by the missionary committee and is responsible to pay 25% of his (or her) cost for the trip. The STM person making the trip will receive a tax deductible receipt for this portion of the money contributed as well the other donors If a person wants to take a second STM trip, no matter if it is to the same country or to another country, the person is now responsible to pay 50% of his costs. If a person wants to go on a third trip he must pay 75% of the costs himself. If a person takes 4 or more trips he will be responsible for paying his own expenses and donations from others is neither encouraged nor discouraged, however, the person is not allowed to "solicit" funds through the church.
+ Fund raising events
- I do a Thai Chicken Curry Lunch right after church at other churches in the area as a fund raiser. I split the money raised with them to support their youth missions. I can talk about the mission I'm doing, give a door prize, and support their youth missions program at the same time. I give private small group Thai cooking lessons-this is my best fund raiser aside from straight donations. So far I'm netting about $250.00 on each class (about 6 hours of time), plus there are a lot of happy people eating Thai food. They aren't even "church" people...they come from the health club, friends, the beauty salon, etc. to take the class.
+ Don't do yearly trips with the same people to the same location.
- Go somewhere else. I know that a mission agency opened up into Africa, from being exclusively central American focussed, since a donor wanted to give to the type of work, (microenterprise) but wanted to influence Africa) Who's to turn [down] $250,000? Off to Africa they went.
- 2. Get new people on board. Bring in fresh blood, and their new donor team. You expand the number of committed people to your particular overseas ministry. Fund the team as a team rather than as individuals, so that the pot for all pays for everyone.
- My suggestion is to consider not doing several repeat trips a year but maybe only one and look for other opportunities.
- Google "donor fatigue"
+ Add new people to the team
- Our church does have one trip that we have done three consecutive years and it has worked very well by adding and dropping people but always having a few that are repeats to form a core.
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