Financial Health Assessment tool helps churches discern future paths

The Presbyterian Foundation has launched the second iteration of its Financial Health Assessment tool for churches.

Image

The tool helps church treasurers, stewardship teams and pastors learn more about their congregation’s church finances and how they compare to other congregations of similar size in their region. Each assessment provides a report with comparative data along with suggestions for stewardship resources and other financial assistance.

The tool’s origins began in 2012 with “three or four people sitting in the Charlotte airport saying, church treasurers don't have the ability to compare their data with others,” says Paul Grier, the Foundation’s Vice President for Project Regeneration.

“We saw that clergy people have these networks and they talk to each other, but church treasurers don't usually have that,” he continued. “We said, what if we built some kind of tool, not so much to tell people you're doing great or you're doing poorly, but just to say, here's how you're doing compared to everybody else.”

The omission of giving data from information collected by the PC(USA) statistical services group from 2020-2022 temporarily disrupted the real-time use of the assessment tool. In 2022, Foundation representatives asked the General Assembly to re-add these data points into the annual report from congregations, to which it agreed, and subsequent years’ reports have been built on this financial information.

The pause in use of the Financial Health Assessment tool allowed the Presbyterian Foundation to rethink its approach to what information it needed to be most effective and the reports it produced. Making the information easier to use and allowing mobile access were top priorities for “version 2” of the instrument, says Karl Mattison, the Foundation’s Vice President of Planned Giving Resources. This new version of the Financial Health Assessment was built by Via Studio, a Louisville-based marketing agency.

People using the assessment tool are required to have basic information about the church’s giving such as how many “giving units” — individuals, couples or families — regularly contribute, total annual contributions, percentage of budget that comes from contributions, bequest information and capital campaign history. While Grier cautions the tool is not “sophisticated” in the way it does financial analysis, it is a useful comparative tool for congregations to find solutions to common problems.

“The relevance of the data sometimes isn't so much in the data itself, but it starts the conversation in that finance committee or in that session meeting,” he says. “Folks have something to respond to and to talk about and to say, ‘Gosh, we thought we were doing terrible. Turns out we're doing pretty well in this category, but we are trailing behind in another category.’”

The assessment’s report is broken down into three sections, highlighting criteria congregations are “Doing Well In,” “Needs Attention,” or “For Immediate Review.” Categories analyzed are Endowments & Major Givers, Leadership, Planning, Participation & Online Giving, Capital Campaigns, Building an Endowment, Bequests & Planned Giving, Preaching & Communication, and Deficits & Debt.

“There are two directions that it sends you,” Mattison says. “One is it gives you this self-help immediately: it produces a report and says, Hey, this is an area that really needs attention for you, and here's the different resources that we provide for you.”

One of the most common online resources the report points congregations toward is Stewardship Navigator, a tool for Presbyterian congregations that offers practical help with everything from a narrative budget builder and stewardship campaign ideas to examples of thank you notes, a brochure maker and multimedia educational tools.

Dozens of other resources include helps for legacy giving, charitable trusts, the church financial leadership academy and coaching, the annual Stewardship Kaleidoscope conference, endowment resources, and the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program are included as links to relevant areas in the assessment report.

Mattison says the second direction the tool recommends is to seek the help of a Presbyterian Foundation Ministry Relations Officer (MRO).

Since the tool is available to all congregations, and churches of different sizes have different financial needs, he says offering additional resources along with the report allows the assessment tool to scale to serve the entire denomination.

“Not everyone needs to meet with a Ministry Relations Officer — they’re available for that deeper dive, but they are also a finite resource,” Mattison says. “Everyone can use Stewardship Navigator; any church can work toward creating a culture of generosity or toward planning a capital campaign; every congregation can use these resources to rethink how they communicate and conduct their annual stewardship campaign, and that’s the ultimate goal.”

Grier and Mattison collectively admit it’s their jobs to “think about this stuff almost all day,” and understand most church financial administrators are volunteers who dedicate a few hours each week to ensuring their congregation’s finances run smoothly. This tool, they say, is one step in helping churches develop a more robust plan for stewardship and sustainability.

Although a revision to the current assessment tool are not planned at this time, the team responsible for developing it is already thinking about how it can provide more and better data for congregations.

Future versions of the Financial Health Assessment tool may be able to forecast information based on trends, but this capability is in its infancy.

“[This] takes some more advanced modeling and economic understanding than just, ‘Hey, we added members, we added money,’” Grier says. “We are working on some predictive information at a presbytery level. So far, the feedback has been helpful.”

The good news is the building blocks are there to envision an even more robust tool in the future due to the nature of the denomination’s reporting requirements and the historic data that has already been collected.

“Presbyterians typically collect more and better data than just about any other denomination,” Grier says. “The trouble is a lot of times we don't use it. And part of that is sometimes we don't report it in relevant, meaningful ways that can help folks figure out what kind of changes they need to make.”