Otto Peter, a parishioner at Christ Church Memorial in Oshawa, is an experienced church fundraiser. In the 1980s, he worked on both the national church’s Anglicans in Mission campaign and the diocese’s Faith in Action campaign.
So when the Rev. Judy Paulsen, incumbent, told him the diocese was rolling out a new fundraising campaign called Our Faith-Our Hope: Re-imagine Church, he says his response was, “It’s about time the diocese had another fundraising campaign; it’s been over 20 years.”
That was Ms. Paulsen’s cue to ask him to chair the campaign, and he agreed right away. “In church lore, asking for money is one of the hardest things people have to do,” he says. “I don’t really mind it.”
He also saw another benefit. There would be a lot of visiting. “We haven’t had a proper visitation- type stewardship campaign for many years, and a lot of people probably haven’t been visited in their home,” he explains. “So I thought it gave us an opportunity to connect with a lot of our parishioners.”
His lengthy fundraising experience has convinced him that visiting people in their own homes is key to a successful outcome. Now retired, Mr. Peter did a lot of that visiting for the current campaign. He set up teams of two people to call on parishioners, and he and his fundraising partner visited some 33 families.
Sometimes the calls lasted a long time. Mr. Peter has been a parishioner at Christ Church Memorial for 28 years and could answer people’s questions not only about the campaign but also about what was going on in the church.
While Our Faith-Our Hope suggests home visits only to major donors, Mr. Peter disagreed. He expanded his calls to others on the parish list, thinking that he himself would prefer a visit to a phone call.
“I thought it would be a smart thing to do, because even if they weren’t heavy financial donors, they were people who contributed a lot in other ways,” he says.
It worked out well. Some of the families made significant contributions that the campaign probably would not otherwise have received. “Visits raised the vast majority of the money,” he says. “The average donation was probably three times as high for a visit as for a phone call.”
The executive committee that Mr. Peter chaired had seven members, and they teamed up with seven other volunteers to make visits. In addition, a dozen people made phone calls.
In the beginning, it was hard to enroll volunteers, he says. He had expected certain people to join the executive committee, but “we didn’t get who we thought we were going to get.”
He was pleasantly surprised by the people who did say yes and the amount of work they put in. One woman, recently widowed, did not think she would be any good at it, but reluctantly agreed to be his partner when Mr. Peter said he would do all the talking.
“She was quiet, but she did speak. She liked to do it and didn’t turn down any visits,” he says. “She really enjoyed it.”
Phone volunteers had a harder time and Mr. Peter needed to keep their spirits up when they got discouraged over refusals. But, he says, once they got a donation, spirits soared.
Overall, the campaign was a positive experience for the parish, he says, and it reached 95 per cent of its goal.
Volunteering is a way of giving back