Finding ways to link your congregation to stewardship requires a marketing lens to “sell” stewardship as an essential element of the Presbyterian experience, and that “support must be earned, it cannot be expected,” said speaker Carson Brown at Stewardship Kaleidoscope.

“How focused are we on selling what we’re doing to the people within our congregation?” Brown asked on the opening day of the Presbyterian Foundation’s Stewardship Kaleidoscope 2025 in New Orleans. The annual conference is presented by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Brown is a graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University with a B.A. in Communication and is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary.  He serves as a pastoral resident at First Presbyterian Church in Bonita Springs, FL.

“Why is marketing important? Why do we need to sell stewardship? Many of us come from generations where it’s just an expectation that people are going to give – not just on Sunday mornings but when their pledge envelopes roll around,” he said.

“We’ve always been able to reliably count on people to come into church and feel a sense of obligation to contribute to the mission of that church through their time, talent and especially their treasures,” Brown said.

The reality, though, is that churches compete for donations with dozens or hundreds of other organizations, many of which use comprehensive marketing tools to reach their audiences. Calls by the church for financial support faces challenges from families’ schools, non-profit clubs such as the local theater or symphony, and other groups.

The youngest generations, teens and young adults, have a strong distrust of organizations, research shows. Gen Z tends to see society as becoming less generous. Their own levels of giving support that – but they also outshine all other generations in terms of volunteering their time to organizations.

Further, post-Covid, as more and more people decide to stay away from attending church services, why would you not expect giving to decrease as well?

Brown’s tips for selling stewardship apply equally to “selling” the church experience in general:

• All marketing is communicating.
• Identify and clearly understand campaign principles, goals, and objectives.
• Develop a strategy for plainly and meaningfully communicating these things.
• Never assume knowledge!
• Never expect even what’s plainly obvious – try to inform the congregation about church needs and how they’ll be addressed, instead of expecting people to know.

For the Boomer generation, Facebook is an excellent tool to share church news. For social media campaigns, use a good mix of cell-phone videos, testimonials, info-graphics and simple calls-to-action to keep the page active.

Interestingly, people under age 45 might prefer to receive church news and stewardship promotions through the mail – because they grew up not receiving a lot of handwritten notes, letters and cards, Brown said. For printed materials, there are several easy-to-use graphic programs such as Canva that help design flyers, information cards and other marketing materials.

Still, face-to-face visits typically are most effective when it comes to sharing the church’s needs and stewardship opportunities. For smaller churches with perhaps 500 or fewer active members, in-person visits can be a great tool – but might be impractical for larger churches, he said.

Finally, when communicating with church members and the community about what’s going on, including stewardship opportunities, Brown recommends going back to the basics of logos, ethos, pathos: Use logic and what makes sense; appeal to people’s sense of what’s right, and appeal to feelings and passion.