Year-End Giving and Kenny Jahng's Background

Welcome back to the unSeminary podcast. Today’s podcast is the first of a two-part series with my friend, Kenny Jahng, the founder of Big Click Syndicate which helps cause-driven organizations get their messages in front of the right audiences.

Did you know the last 45 days of the year are crucial for charitable giving? Because people are thinking about being generous during this time, it’s a critical time for nonprofits. But that also means your people are bombarded with many different good causes. Don’t miss this conversation with Kenny to discover how your church can encourage giving as a spiritual discipline while increasing your mission’s impact in the upcoming year!

• The last 45 days. // The last 45 days of the year are a golden period for charitable giving because people are more inclined to be generous during this time. However, the digital age has broadened the range of causes people can support, making it a crowded space for nonprofits. Churches, though, have an edge. More than merely a transaction, giving is a spiritual discipline with a greater purpose which leads to a larger faith conversation. Moreover, unlike nonprofits that may only have one annual event to gather supporters, churches regularly interact with their donors.
• Overcoming obstacles. // Despite the advantages, churches may not fully leverage the last 45 days of the year due to reasons like holiday burnout and discomfort talking about money in church. There’s also the tension between driving attendance and promoting giving during the Christmas season. However a well-structured year-end campaign can appeal to the community around you and create a connection between giving and increased attendance.
• Best Year-End Ever. // To address the challenges churches face around developing a year-end campaign, Kenny along with Carey Nieuwhof and Rich have developed a coaching cohort, Best Year-End Ever, focused on helping churches have their best year-end ever in terms of giving. Best Year-End Ever is structured with a step-by-step process, providing weekly or bi-weekly online meetings to guide churches through the campaign. Despite covering 87 different aspects, participants have found the program manageable and not overwhelming. The program emphasizes a “quick to apply” mindset, focusing on execution rather than debating and analyzing the process.
• Ready-to-use templates. // One of the highlights of Best Year-End Ever is the library of ready-to-use resources. Professional designers have created assets and design templates for various marketing materials, such as brochures, video scripts, social media templates, and text messages. These templates are customizable and cater to different church personalities, whether they are modern, traditional, or somewhere in between.
• Work the plan. // The team at Best Year-End Ever has done all the planning work for church leaders so all they need to do is work through the plan. In fact, Kenny and his team are so confident in their proven process that they are offering a 100% money-back guarantee if participants are not satisfied with the results. This guarantee is aimed at activating more leaders, supporting them in funding their ministry visions for the next year, and helping them as they engage their congregations.

To find out how you can get involved in the Best Year-End Ever coaching cohort, visit bestyearendever.com.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: CDF Capital

Since 1953 CDF Capital has helped church leaders and individuals bring light to the world through the thoughtful stewardship of their capital. The Church, including your church, requires more than just financial capital, it also needs spiritual and leadership capital. While separate in purpose, these three forms of capital are intertwined and inseparable for the cause of kingdom growth. Together, when we partner with the Lord to bring spiritual, leadership, and financial capital to a church, the results are transformational. At CDF Capital our ministry is simple: we lend money to churches.

CDF Capital, in partnership with Barna Group, conducted a research study to better understand what happens in churches after a new leader comes in. Barna Group interviewed 111 pastors online who have experienced a leadership transition within the last 12 years. Click here to get your free download of the study.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Well hey, everybody, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. You are welcome to the first of a two part series with my friend, Kenny Jahng. If you do not know Kenny, he’s the founder of big clicks Big Click Syndicate. Ah he is really all over the internet. If you are looking for information help on communications, and particularly AI, he is the go-to. Kenny, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, great to be with you, Rich. Every single time I’m with you I just know I’m gonna have some fun.

Rich Birch — Nice. I love this. And you know, Kenny and are are friends in in the real world ah but I wanted to bring him on the podcast to talk really about two different distinct things. So this episode today is all about year-end giving. And then next week we’re going to talk about AI because Kenny is the bishop of AI so you’re going to want he’s helping all kinds of ministries on this these days. But today we want to talk really about year-end giving. But first why don’t you give us a bit of your background, kind of tell us a bit of the Kenny Jahng story ah for folks that don’t know. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Kenny Jahng — Great. The clever version is I spent a good deal of time working in the marketplace, mostly in the marketing communications space, right, building those muscles for direct marketing, advertising, you know all the different ah, disciplines of marketing. And then I went to seminary, I was called to seminary and have you know refocused my energies in helping ministries build marketing engines that basically nurture raving fans for the mission.

Kenny Jahng — One of the things that we see is nonprofits, ministries, churches um, they are like the best kept secret. They’ve got so much good, and the work that they do transforms people. And but sometimes it’s just hard to get the word out and so I think God’s call has been for me to take those marketplace best practices and help ministries get the word out on the street, and build just this tribe around the cause and the mission that they have in front of them.

Rich Birch — Yeah, you’re being really humble. Kenny, this is the thing I like about you you, you know, you’ve helped all kinds of organizations, not only churches all across the country, folks that you would know, but national nonprofits as well—folks like American Bible Society, Biblica, CDF Capital, Leadership Network, Redeemer United Methodist. It just goes on and on and on…

Kenny Jahng — A lot of good friends.

Rich Birch — …ah ah yeah amazing. Yeah, and your education background is incredible too. You are like my one of my smart friends. So studied at Duke, Columbia, and Princeton – that’s like the trifecta of amazing schools. Anyways, I’m I’m glad you’re here.

Kenny Jahng — I I like to collect paper, Rich, I like to collect…

Rich Birch — Ah, yeah, that’s so good. Well anyways, well let’s talk about year-end giving. So this is coming up. You know we’ve been kind of teasing this on social media, you know, the last 45 days of the year. This is super important. And I know that lots of nonprofits, particularly, they work all year thinking about this period. You know and that number of the nonprofits that you’ve worked with I’m sure have been thinking about you know that last 45 days from a giving point of point of view. Why is that so important? Why why do they spend so much time thinking about that? Why should we spend time working on it?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah I think it’s it is the entire landscape of charitable giving some somehow is seasonal, right? And that Q4 of every single year is the time where there’s this huge opportunity in front of everybody because people are thinking about being generous. And one of the things that I think is really important for every single ministry to to think about is that in today’s day and world people are thinking about a portfolio of giving now. They don’t just give to one place.

Kenny Jahng — I think back in the day it was a little bit more consistent where if you belong to a church, um, you definitely would support that as the majority of your wallets in terms of giving. And today we’re just bombarded with so many different good causes. There’s there’s an up and downside of social media and digital communications is that it is easier for so many great causes to present their unique opportunities to do good in this world and help you partner with them financially. But at the same time it just makes it a crowded space. And so this is the time of year that if you have a vision for what you want to do next year, and you want margin in your budget, if you want to expand and do have more impact, um, you have the ability to bring on financial partners to really align with what you have to do in terms of the mission of your organization.

Rich Birch — Right, right. Incredible. Yeah, and I know um, there’s percentages out there like it’s a huge percentage of giving that’s given in the last 45 days. Um, and you know that obviously makes sense. I think part of it is driven by tax receipts, right? It’s like it’s this interesting kind of combo in our culture of people are thinking about their annual giving and they start thinking about taxes. But then there also is the broader kind of Christmas season does drive generosity as well. And so that ends up driving up ah you know the amount of giving. In fact I think 10% of all giving is done in the last 48 hours of the of the year which is crazy. It’s like a huge amount of money.

Rich Birch — Ah now what advantages when you think about the local church, so I know from my seat executive pastor, thinking about giving, I see all that um, all those other nonprofits out there. I see them, you know, talking to my people even if it’s through ads online, or you know, every year I get this lumpy mail this huge piece of mail that comes from this nonprofit that I’ve given to in the past, right early in the fall. I know that they’re trying to target me by the end of the year. But what advantages do we have in the local church over nonprofits, particularly, ah who might we might look at and say, man they’re just so well-funded. They do just an amazing job on the communications front. What would be some of those advantages that that you think we have?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I think we have a purpose and meaning and significance tied to giving as a spiritual discipline, not just as a transaction an opportunity to help something. Now I think, you know, all there are many nonprofits that have great causes out there.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — Um that it’s not it’s not that just because they’re transactional it doesn’t mean that they’re not good causes. But I think the advantages churches have is that this can either be the continuation of, or the start of a conversation you can have with your people in terms of what does generosity mean? And that this this season, if it’s a campaign that you’re building or something that you’re trying to focus on, isn’t just a one-time popup shop event. It is part of a larger faith conversation in terms of a spiritual discipline. And I think that’s the real advantage that we have in terms of focusing and framing the conversation.

Rich Birch — Um, yeah, totally. The other piece of it too that I know we have is we, and I think sometimes we take this for granted, like we see our people – not all of them, but we see our people every seven days generally. You know, when you think about a nonprofit, think about all the time effort energy they put into like a gala…

Kenny Jahng — Yes.

Rich Birch — …once a year they kind of try to get everybody together. But we’re, you know, in our environments, man, we see people every single week. And it’s so critically important during this time of year that we leverage that weekend, that we leverage the chance to, you know, see people as they come and go out of our environments, knowing it’s not everybody on top of any of that kind of other communication ah that we we use. Now why do you think some churches maybe don’t leverage these last 45 days of the years. What would hold them back? What would be the sticking points around them thinking, I just don’t want to I just don’t want to do something extra above and beyond at this time of year.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah I think the first one is just burnout.

Rich Birch — That’s so true.

Kenny Jahng — Everyone knows and if you’ve been in ministry for any length of time, Christmas is tiring, right?

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — It’s just the almost the unspoken um business side of doing churches—Christmas, Easter—these big days take a lot out of you as a pastor, as church staff, etc. Um, many times you’re just looking forward to getting through the season. Um, and so putting something else on your plate just is daunting for so many people.

Kenny Jahng — I think the second reason is it’s hard to talk about money. We we are not taught in seminary on how to talk about money and generosity and giving. And the default is that you only talk about when you need it, and then you’re training your audience to have this expectation of, oh he only comes when it’s something… right? It’s only it’s, and there’s a conflict of interest, right? Like when you talk about generosity only when you need it, the audience senses that there’s something off there. So I think people are not used to talking about money and generosity. They don’t know how to um, and so that I think that’s a very big thing to stumble upon.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. I also know for us in the past there’s been this tension. The first time we did ah a year-end campaign like this, there’s this tension of, hey Christmas is a time of year where we want to be driving our people to invite their friends, that we want to be driving… and and will this kind of…

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …if we also talk about giving stuff will that somehow either dilute or distract from that messaging. And that’s just not true, like you can do both of them do them. Well um, in fact, actually one can help the other if we’re a well-structured year-end campaign can um, also help, you know, really your appeal to the community around you. Because you end up talking about things that are making a difference in your community. You end up talking about the kind of things that actually first time guest might be excited ah to be a part of.

Rich Birch — Well we ah you know part of why I wanted to get you on is you and I and our friend Carey Nieuwhof are running something called Best Year-End Ever, which is this is our second year. It’s a coaching cohort. It’s deliberately small. Ah it’s, you know, we’re we’re going to have ah you know a few handfuls of churches in this. This is not like a huge thing. The idea is to get face-to-face with you and me, and Carey over this fall and ultimately lead to the end of the year to to really have what it’s called the best year-end ever. Um, and we’ve seen, you know, our hope is, our prayer is that, man, if you could engage with this process, you should be able to see somewhere around a 10% increase in your annual giving. So if you look at your total budget of the year, it’s not unreasonable…so let’s say your budget is 500,000, it’s not unreasonable to think about a $50,000 campaign that would be above and beyond what you would anticipate at the end of this year. This is our second year ah that we’ve done this. Why don’t you talk us through kind of. Some of the framework of it. How does it work? What’s it look like, all those kind of things?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we we the mantra that we have—I guess we should make t-shirts, Rich—is it’s: plan to work and then work the plan, right?

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Kenny Jahng — Some of it is is that there’s not really too much secret sauce. It really is just about discipline, sequence, priority of the work and getting ahead of it. And sometimes it’s again, it’s overwhelming. So what we’ve done is we’ve laid out a calendar based on years of doing this for different organizations and churches. And we’ve basically set up every single week a whole list of things to do. So if it’s like going to the gym, I think, and having a personal trainer where you don’t actually need to think about, Oh what rotation of machines I need to what do I need to do? Is it leg day, is it, right? Like you don’t need to think about all that. You just need to show up. And then every single week we will guide you through the process of what do you need to think of now. What do you think what do you need to think about now that’s going to impact two weeks, three weeks, four weeks later. And so we meet on a weekly basis um or biweekly basis sometimes, and weekly basis sometimes, and we will coach you through the entire process.

Kenny Jahng — I think, Rich, I think there’s 87 different things that we cover over the course of the entire program, and um I think if you talk to any of the participants, they all say it didn’t feel overwhelming at all.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. You know one of the things I we’ve structured this with this just-in-time learning environment where um, really we want you to come to this with the the attitude of quick-to-apply. So don’t… we’ve structured this it is a proven step-by-step process that we’ve put together here and it it includes resources, which I want you to talk about in a second here, Kenny. But we’ve laid it out in a way that’s like okay here’s step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, and don’t come to this with your mindset around like, hey I’m going to debate this; I wonder if this is the way to go. No.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Come to the mindset with quick-to-apply. Okay, I’m going to come to these sessions. I’m gonna say, what can I put into action right away. What we’ve seen time and again—this is true in the cohorts you and I have run, I know in the stuff we’ve done that isn’t together, just when we work with people in general—the people that get the most out of it are the people who come to it with the attitude of okay, what can how can I just apply this? What do I how do I make this happen? Think about execution. Don’t think about, Hmmm is this the right way? This is a proven process and we’ve we’ve laid it out in a way to make it easy for you because we know you’ve got a lot going on. We know you’ve got a ton of, you know, things happening and you want kind of a guide, somebody to to come along with you.

Rich Birch — Now one of the things I love about what we’ve done here is put together a ton of ready to use resources.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — Talk to us about some of those. What do those look like? How are they, you know, how are they pulled together? How and maybe talk about last year how we saw some of those be used.

Kenny Jahng — Absolutely. Well I think the program is pretty amazing because you me and Carey sat down and really thought through what does a successful campaign need, right? There’s basically four phases. There’s the Countdown phase you need to do all the work in terms of architecting your campaign and figuring out and planning the timeline. And then there’s the second phase which we call Ignition. And that’s literally like getting people ready, get started, trained, um getting everything set up. And the third one is Launch, to go public. You’re going to actually have a public section of the campaign. And the last one is Orbit, right? We just have this um, you know, final celebration, a recap, and you want to have continuity again in that generosity conversation with your audience.

Kenny Jahng — And so if you take each of those phases. Um, each one of them needs timelines, and checklists, and you’re you’re going to prepare emails, and you’re going to start to actually plan and design brochures, and maybe send out postcards. And you’ll need specific landing pages on your website, right? There’s all these things that you’re going to need. And what we’ve done is we’ve had professional designers create um all these assets and design templates whether it be video scripts, social media templates, um, even text messages to invite leaders to different meetings or coaching people. Um, again, we’ve created a tremendous library of design templates that everyone can use. Um and we went even the extra step, Rich, last year which was we actually responded to the need that not every church has the same look and feel right. Every church has a different personality.

Rich Birch — Yeah, yes, yep.

Kenny Jahng — And so we tasked our designers and challenged them like, Hey, can you come up with multiple versions, designs that an ultramodern, hip, cool church would take, or more traditional steeple church would use, or something that’s in the middle. Um, and so we have multiple variations of every single piece of marketing collateral that we’ve designed for this program. And so they’re all ready to use. They’re customizable. They’re actually built as templates so it’s not hard to use. And in fact I think at least two of the churches, Rich, last year ah, took some of the templates and the executive pastor started modifying the templates because he didn’t even need to assign it to his own graphic designer internally, right?

Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing. I know, it’s incredible like we, yeah, it’s funny, right? Because you develop resources like that and you’re like, well this will be great; churches will use it. And then they use it, which is amazing. And so… and and I know this is yeah, you’re right like particularly, you know, this might be either a lead pastor or an executive pastor who pulls a trigger on this. And, you know, here we are. We’re in September. We’re, you know, you don’t necessarily want to go to your design people and be like, hey I’m going to dump a whole bunch of new stuff on you. We don’t want to give them that pain. We want to focus on other stuff. And so what we’ve tried to do is even whether you’re um, you know, taking it and just absolutely absolutely running with it, or saying, hey make it look sort of like this. It’s like it gives your designer a huge head start on all of these individual pieces because there there is a certain amount of flotsam and jotsum that we have to generate ah to make a campaign go ah well like this.

Rich Birch — Now, Kenny, what about like potholes? When you think about a campaign like this, you know, that maybe doesn’t go well in a church, like there may not be people who are maybe they’ll do it themselves, um, there’s resources they can find online to help that, what would you say would be a common pothole that you’ve seen either a nonprofit or a church fall into when they roll out a campaign like this where they you know it might diminish their results might not go as quite as well?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I think the most common one is that you basically, you know, you fall behind, right? and then it feels like, Wow if I just, you know, didn’t get to this by this time that I originally thought I would then you start to abandon the idea of this campaign. And I think this is one of the reasons why this program has worked successfully for the churches that have participated in it. Because um, you know you arrive in October for our first meeting and you start to get acclimated with what the timeline needs to be, and you know all the timings and things like that. But on a week on each time that we meet across the—I think there’s nine meetings that we will meet—um, you actually get personalized coaching. And that’s the place that I think allows you to go from idea to implementation every single week so that you don’t fall behind. It’s not like ah it’s not like some I think some other workshops have been, you go to a training session and then you get a whole pile of homework that you have to do where you just carved out an hour or two hour of your time to go through the training. And and then now you’re behind an hour two of your weekly schedule. And then you tell me I got to do another 10 hours of work afterwards?

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — And so this is one of those things on a weekly basis we’re able to catch you up. And you’re actually be able to tell you exactly what you need to do for this next week, next two weeks. And we give you all the predesigns and pre-written templates for you to just customize and put into action. In a in a way one of the ah participants in ah in the past this said, it just makes me look like a superhero. It looks makes me look like I’m super-productive to my staff.

Rich Birch — So true. Yeah, it’s so true. You’re like wow where did you come up with all this? This is amazing. That’s ah, that’s so good. Now actually speaking of ah, you know, results. We had last year ah this one of our our participants a guy, Josh, from a church in New York City, just around the corner from you, he participated. Tell us about it’s the what happened at his church. Again, not typical, but pretty cool what happened at at his church.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, so they have never had a formal end of your giving campaign. And so I think that’s the first thing I think we need to dispel like this isn’t for just those mega churches that have, you know, massive giving campaigns, etc. This is for almost every church. And so they’ve never had a giving campaign at the end of the year. Now they’ve done some fundraisers here and there, maybe for a missions trip or something. Um, and so they’ve actually went through the program, used all our materials and then he reported back that their giving campaign exceeded 4X the amount of any…

Rich Birch — That’s great.

Kenny Jahng — …historical campaign that they’ve done um in the past.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s crazy.

Kenny Jahng — And so that’s a jaw dropping number. And if you if you knew the details of the campaign of just how large it was, it was over you know it was 6 figures…

Rich Birch — Yeah, big deal.

Kenny Jahng — …that they were able to raise um in this short period of time.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — And again it was due to the fact that he was just able to stick to the plan. We instead of plan the work, we’ve done the plan the work.

Rich Birch — Yeah

Kenny Jahng — Ah, now you just have to work the plan.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Kenny Jahng — And so that’s a great example of if you just follow through with the recipe, you’ll get a great result in the end.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it. One of the things I love about Josh too is, you know, we have the the regular calls and Josh wouldn’t show up to the regular calls. He’s like, listen I’m not… the time didn’t work in his time zone, which is fine, so he would just watch the replays, watch them on one and a half speed.So as you can imagine, Kenny and I talk and one and a half times faster, but then jump right to application which is amazing. And then there is a way for us to stay connected in between calls, which he was taking advantage of – reaching out, getting a chance for us to answer questions, because that’s a huge deal.

Rich Birch — I know for me, um, what I’m looking for in a coach it’s it’s like I feel like I can figure out 90% of it. But it’s usually that last 10% I’m like, what about this? I need you to look at this document or take a look at this thing. What do you think about this headline? Or here are the 3 buckets that I’m thinking about it but I’m struggling with what to call this third one. Or you know, here is our, you know, here’s an email that we’re working on for next week – take a look at all of those things. It was great to go back and forth with him, and then, you know, super excited to see, you know, that what happened at his church.

Rich Birch — Now, one of the crazy things that when we put this together with, you know, yourself, with Carey is we’re actually going to guarantee the results. Now I don’t know anyone that does any kind of fundraising stuff that is saying, listen I know you’re going to have to pay a fee for this thing, but the results are are guaranteed. That seems crazy. Ah, you know, but the reason why we’re doing that is because we’re two things: we don’t want to take your money if you’re not happy. We don’t want to take your money; we’re we’re here to serve the church. We want to we want you to feel um, you know super supported, and we want you to feel great about this at the end of the process. But we also know it’ll work. We know that if if churches follow the process, it’ll end up, you know, making a difference. And so talk to us about what does that look like? It’s kind of funny, it’s like results guaranteed. It’s like ah you know like an Amway ad or something. Or like an old those old TV ads in the 70s, you know, it it slices, it dices, it does julian fries. Ah, what do what do we mean by, you know, a results-base guarantee?

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I feel like I have to put on my radio voice and talk about the money-back guarantee.

Rich Birch — True.

Kenny Jahng — Um, so I I think this comes I remember the first meeting that we had with Carey, you, and me, and it was one of those things where we were just being approached and saw this need of churches of, you know, how do they actually fund their vision for the next year, right? We came out of covid and it was challenging. A lot of attendances disappeared at that point, and giving was up and down and unpredictable. And so there was this rising need of how do we help our congregation get back on track? Um, and for us I think I remember the conversation vividly, Rich. It was all of us were just like these churches need help. We just need to help more churches. We know that the potential is there. And at the end of the day, again it’s not rocket science. It’s just you need to plan the work and work the plan.

Kenny Jahng — And so I think all of us were just… at there was some point in the conversation I remember like, how can we just make it as like frictionless as possible. How can we just make it a no-brainer that as many churches can just take advantage of this. Because I think for me personally and I think you and Carey, it’s like what can we do in terms of like making our dent in the kingdom to fund more ministry. We just need more ministry to happen in every single zip code…

Rich Birch — Yeah, so true.

Kenny Jahng — …out there. And it’s just a ah fact of life that you know you need budget and funding to make ministry happen. And so that’s where we started and we just challenged stuff. It was just one of those innovation questions of how might we incite more leaders to actually say raise their hand and say, yes. This season I think I’m going to answer the call of really being bold in whatever call that you have on your life to put into action in in your ministry for this next year. Um how do we figure out how to support you? And so that’s what we said. We said, look let’s make it zero risk. Let’s offer a hundred percent money back guarantee. Um, if if you go through the program and you’re not happy with the results, then what would you want? I mean you would be dissatisfied at the point you like I I don’t want to pay for it. I paid for something that didn’t exceed my expectations. And so we just said, yeah, why don’t we do that? Like we’re I mean like you said we’re confident that there’s a proven process that if your church just walks through it, you’re going to get results.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally yes.

Kenny Jahng — And so that’s why we’re offering this guarantee. I think it makes sense to us in terms of trying to activate more leaders to actually inspire them, support them, and at the end of that encourage them to do more ministry and more impact into the next year.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Kenny Jahng — And then it makes sense from the participants point of view that says, you know, we’re here in a high trust environment and we’re going to do anything we can to partner with you to actually make it possible for you to go to your people and um, really activate them in terms of their generosity profile. I think one of the things that you know, Rich, if you look at the stats of giving, um I think a lot of pastors have an aha moment when they look at their giving stats, and sometimes they don’t. And um I so I read something recently 30% 37% of Protestant churchgoing people regularly give money to the church. There’s a lot of people that come to church and actually don’t give to the church, right?

Rich Birch — Right, right.

Kenny Jahng — And that something like 70% 17% of Americans have reduced the amount that they give to church, and yet the average number of um charities that someone supports is over like it was like four and a half charities. So the average number of organizations and individual supports is four and a half and yet they’re giving less to the church. And that not all your people that actually come to church give.

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — How do we activate them? How do we actually invite them into God’s story…

Rich Birch — Right.

Kenny Jahng — …to do more with what God has entrusted and and stewarded them with? And so I think that’s that’s where this is all being driven from.

Rich Birch — Yeah, totally. We want to come alongside you. We have a track record of doing this. I can say no one who’s got to the end of the program has asked for their money back which, you know, also gives us confidence now.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — But if you want to totally fine.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah.

Rich Birch — We you know this is ah it is an a hands open thing. We do not want to hold you back. And we we know it’ll work. Listen, if you put in the work like we’ve been saying. We’ve put the plan together. We’ve brought the resources. We’ve got the experience. We’re ready to answer your specific questions. We would love for you to join us. I really do think it’ll be a great opportunity for you. Super-pumped about that.

Rich Birch — If people are interested all they need to do is go to bestyearendever.com. We get kicked off at the beginning of October so you need to take action now. Reach out. Let’s talk about how ah, you know, if you’ve got any questions we’re happy to answer them. If you’re following me on you know, email or social media, reach out. I’m happy to answer whatever questions we can for you. If you need more information, if you have any more questions we’re happy to do that. I want to give you, Kenny, the last word here as we wrap up today’s episode, but then we’re looking forward to the next week where we’re going to talk to you about AI and really dive deep on how churches can leverage AI to help them. But but let’s so give you the last word as we think about the Best Year-End Ever.

Kenny Jahng — Yeah, I I think it’s it’s ah maybe it’s a challenge or a call to action that says, many times in the leader’s life um, we have we have dreams for what we can do in in helping exalts God and and do some kingdom work. But ah sometimes we worry about our dreams and we try to manage them. And I would say don’t worry about dreaming too big. Um, if you are doing it for the right reasons and you’re trying to to actually mobilize your ministry um I challenge you to bring your vision, bring your goals and let’s figure out ways to fund your vision, and figure out what what we can do to help you put that plan into action for this next year. I think that’s the biggest thing is like how might you actually take the ability for your congregation to rally together around some good causes that you are focused on for this next year, and fund that vision for next year together.

Rich Birch — Love it. Thanks, Kenny; appreciate you being here. Thank you for all that you’re doing to help so many different organizations. Thanks, buddy.