Report on the Stewardship Campaign Lent 2008
Introduction
In the first four weeks of Lent this year we ran a Stewardship Campaign. The aims were to increase giving by standing order and gift aid, and to raise awareness amongst members of the congregation of how the church functions locally and at a diocesan level in terms of finance. Both of these aims have been largely achieved and the resulting increase in support for the church has been very dramatic. The first thing to record then is a vote of congratulations to ourselves as a community! The response to the campaign shows that people are committed to St Andrew’s as a church and community, and also indicates that we can look ahead financially with much more confidence than previously.
Thank you to every one of you who felt able to respond to the campaign; I am delighted with the results. Thank you also to Mark and Hannah Rawlings-Smith who planned the campaign. The notes and graphs below are their explanation of what has been achieved.
Fr Martin
Report from the Campaign Organisers
It will not be until the end of the year, when we have all of the financial information for 2008 that we will know for certain how effective the stewardship campaign has been. It is possible at this stage, however, to review the number of standing orders which have been placed or increased during the campaign, and provide an idea of how successful the campaign has been.
Increases in Standing Orders
One of the main aims of the Stewardship Campaign, alongside increasing the level of regular giving, was to encourage people to give regularly by standing order. This has two very big advantages. The first is that we are able to plan the budgets more accurately, and understand when and where we can spend money. The second is that it takes a lot less time for an automatic bank transfer to happen than it does for someone to count all the money (something which currently takes several hours each week).
The good news is that the increase in standing orders has been very significant
Total Giving
We know that in 2007, we received £36,616 from donors, which includes all forms of giving. The chart below shows the increase we expect to see for 2008…..
The £36,616 has gone down to £32,539, because some of the new standing orders will have previously been people giving in other ways. The total result is that we expect around £49,000 in 2008. This is an increase of around £12,500 per year.
Gift Aid Reclaimed
Another very important part of the income at St. Andrew’s is that from the Chancellor! In 2007, we reclaimed £6,769 of Income Tax back from the government. This is a large part of our annual income.
We can only reclaim the tax if first, the donor is an income tax payer, and secondly, that each person who gives to St. Andrew’s, and is a tax payer, fills out a Gift Aid form, allowing us to claim the tax back. From the additional Standing Orders we have received, we expect to get around £1,600 of tax back from the Chancellor each year.
The last column on the chart above shows that if everybody who has set up a standing order also signed a Gift Aid form, then we would get almost another £1,500 per year back from the Chancellor.
This final page shows in a bit more detail, how our annual income was split up in 2007, and what we expect to see in 2008.
