Christmas is a great time to reach out to potential new donors, and you can run this list to make sure you’re reaching out to the right people.

Before we get into the list rules, let’s talk about why this is a great time of year to reach out to new donors. Why? Because a lot of people already get it. Christmas is already the season of giving and people want to give. The greatest thing about this list is that these people have been involved in some capacity at your church this year, but they haven’t given. Sometimes giving comes easy for families, other times it takes a few months to plant some roots in some other ministries. This list will target the families that have attended an event, dropped their kids off at church on the weekend, attended a group, or served on a serve team, but have not donated anything.

List Rules

Rule #1

The first rule grabs all the people that did any of the things mentioned above – served, or attended an event, church service, serve team. Make sure you set the matching conditions to “any”.

Rule #2

The second rule will remove all the people (and their spouses/joint donors) that have given this year – we’re excluding the people in this list which have given something this year. In our case, we used another list, but the list rules are directly below. You can see we’re also including each of these in an “and” or a matching “all”.

…and the actual list rules for the list named “People who given this year”

Rule #3

Lastly, we wanted to make sure we were only including adults, but you know your church better than we do and you can add in some additional rules here to remove certain groups of people if you want. For example, you might remove certain membership types if your church classifies businesses a certain way, or honorarium donors a different way.

Conclusion

You could absolutely send a generalized email out to your entire congregation about giving this year, and that will probably yield some results. However, anytime you get the opportunity to use specific language with people, your message will hit a little bit better and will often times yield greater results.

Consider reminding these people about what you accomplished this year; how you helped teach their kids on weekends, put on outreach events that they may attended, and started new discipleship groups to form tighter bonds and relationships outside of regular weekend service. These things are made possible because of their donations and encourage them to reflect on how your church impacted them and how many people you’ll have the opportunity to impact headed into the next year.

Good luck!

P.S. You can monitor the results of this list be “refreshing” it after you’ve sent out the email and given folks a few days to give. If you started out with 1,000 people on this list, and after a week it goes down to 800, that’s 20%!