In this Issue:

• • Let There Be Light: Inspiring Generosity and End-of-Year Giving
  • Expanded Perspective: As the Light Grows
  • ECRF 2025: Empower Your Fundraising Journey
  • Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship: Applications Closing Soon!

By Meredith McNabb, Associate Director of Education, Lake Institute

According to some reports, as much as one-fourth to one-third of overall charitable giving takes place in the final few weeks of the year—and lived experience in many congregations and religious nonprofits has taught many of us to count on end-of-year giving to “catch up” to our hopes and expectations, or perhaps catch up to our budgets’ and expenditures’ needs.

For those leaders whose work focuses primarily on fundraising in their organizations, this is the busy season to ask, to find ways to stand out from all the other opportunities for generosity appearing in our donors’ mailboxes and email accounts, and perhaps to hold our breath as we see if goals will be met and the work of our organizations will be able to move forward.

For those leaders whose work is not primarily fundraising, this is a busy season for entirely other reasons! Special sacred observances, extra community gatherings, annual festivities, special concerts and meals, and particular opportunities to care for those in need fill (or overfill) our calendars, in addition to keeping an eye on the regular and special giving that may make or break our budgets and cash flow.

All of that is very real, but those pressures do not have to be the source of burnout. As always, Lake Institute offers the invitation to consider how the work of fundraising in a religious context can align with the spiritual sides of one’s traditions and not just the nuts and bolts of organizational sustainability.

Whether “fundraiser” is one’s primary role or not, this is not a month to ignore the good work of “teaching people the joy of giving,” as Henry Rosso, the founding director for our colleagues in The Fund Raising School, liked to put it.

Write the end-of-year letter. Make a compelling case for a good cause to put in your social media. Check in (with warmth and authenticity) with your major donors. Write thank-you notes to your new givers. Make a note for yourself to follow up in the new year to evaluate what “worked” and what you’d do differently in Q4 next year.

But more than all that—consider why so much generosity comes to fruition at this time of year and remember why all of this work matters so much. It’s not just credit for one’s springtime tax filings that’s making donors turn toward the causes and the organizations that they value so much. Generosity is a virtue and a practice that crosses faith traditions—using what one has to heal the world, to love one’s neighbor, to honor and care for one’s fellow human beings. In whatever way one’s tradition expresses it, generosity is a core part of the right way to live as a person of faith. Across many traditions and cultures, the final weeks of the year offer teachings, rituals, and holidays that steer us toward particular attention to gratitude and generosity—and many of those sacred observances steer us toward the light: Hindus celebrate light as a symbol of knowledge and goodness when Diwali comes in the mid-to-late autumn. Jewish celebrations of miraculous light and divine assistance take place with end-of-the-year menorahs during Chanukah. Many Christians add more and more light to their Advent candles across the four weeks of December before Christmas.

Simran Jeet Singh, Lake Institute’s 2023 Distinguished Visitor, points to the Sikh tradition’s value of practicing seva—“love-inspired, selfless service”—to respond to the first teaching of founder Guru Nanak: “The same divine light pervades everyone and everything.” (Guru Nanak’s birth is celebrated in the final months of the calendar year also!)

There’s all manner of ways in each tradition to connect to the metaphor and ritual of “more light,” but telling the story of how our places are, in fact, adding faith-rooted goodness to the world makes a huge difference in connecting the fundraising work to the spiritual yearnings of our givers.

In the Executive Certificate in Religious Fundraising courses, we invite participants to consider how they would finish these story prompts:

• A young person’s life was changed in our work when…

• A person’s spiritual life was transformed in our work when…

• Our organization/congregation got started when…

• An “outsider” to our community was positively affected when…

With just a little reflection time, stories start pouring out about tender, beautiful, life- and community-changing work—and even in the classroom exercise, a lot of us are just about ready to break out the QR codes and make gifts! These are the stories of impact that introduce your prospective donors to what good they can do through a gift to you—and they’re the stories that remind your longtime donors why the work still matters so much.

In whatever tradition our congregations and organizations find their roots, meaning, and values, our donors always deserve the opportunity to make spiritual connections between how they live and what they believe. While the final weeks of the year may make all the difference to organizational balance sheets, end-of-the-year giving is perhaps even more a tremendous instance to pull that spiritual opportunity to the front of people’s minds and to put a genuine and meaningful invitation to action at their fingertips.