Improve the effectiveness of your offering envelopes with a flexible approach by giving your members only the number of offering envelopes they'll use. Cathedral's Flexible Offering Envelope Program provides your members with customized offering envelopes built around each individual family or member's frequency of making offerings—whether they give weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly. This program offers total flexibility to provide the number, type and delivery mode of your offering envelopes, plus the option to personalize, select designs, color and benefit from Cathedral's latest bar coding, dating, numbering and mailing technologies. It all adds up to less laborious processing, higher rates of contributions, and a program that recognizes today's emphasis on preserving the environment.
Providing the appropriate number of offering envelopes to each contributing member has often proved to lower offering envelope costs and actually increase contribution amounts. This program is also an excellent way to rekindle relationships with your inactive members because it enables them to contribute to the church on their own terms.
The first step is a simple survey of your church's membership to determine the frequency of giving preferences of each member. You can use the sample survey form provided by Cathedral to distribute to your membership, or you can ask your treasurer to review the frequency of past contributions of each pledging family or individual member, including how well they respond to special collections. From the survey, you’ll also learn about the giving preferences of individual members, including:
The offering envelope survey affords the opportunity to frame questions that reveal (or confirm) contribution patterns and preferences in your parish. You may discover how to increase the awareness of special fund raising and capital projects. You may uncover opportunities to build or rebuild a new spirit of stewardship. In fact, the more you learn, the better off you are in managing your church's resources in an effective and sensible fashion.
It's likely you'll be surprised at the number of offering envelopes that go unused by your parish. The most obvious and significant element of the survey data is that the church may be able to reduce its annual envelope consumption. The reduction in envelopes is accomplished by providing an appropriate product to your members. Members will see first-hand the church's efforts to reduce waste, and may respond in kind with increased offerings—renewed in their faith that the church will spend their contributions wisely.
You can build a worksheet that lists each member and the envelope program they will receive. This will give you approximate counts for each envelope program. At this point, we can provide you with a cost estimate. Typically, we require separate member lists for each envelope program ordered.
Each of Cathedral's envelope products offers a unique set of features and benefits. The Flexible Contribution Program allows you to apply any combination of these envelopes to address your church's unique weekly offering challenges. This flexible, "best fit" approach pays maximum dividends on your investment.
For more information and answers to frequently asked questions, click here!