ECF360 – Stewardship & Fundraising Resources for your parish this Fall
Since the Episcopal Church Foundation rolled out ECF360, over 120 parishes have signed up for its new low-cost, self-service, subscription site. ECF360 features a variety of templated and downloadable resources for annual giving/stewardship, capital campaigns and planned giving. ECF360 includes numerous downloadable template letters, spreadsheets and resources for conducting annual giving campaigns and resources to enable successful year-long stewardship efforts such as narrative budgeting, calendar guidelines, and much more. The system offers eight different campaign options, from ‘Every Member Visitation’, to ‘Direct Mail’ or ‘Online Campaigns’. Users can be creative and mix and match campaign styles and all of its various resources from a single website.
ECF will continue to expand and enhance all of these self-service tools in 2023, including adding Spanish language stewardship resources and new solicitation and thank you letters.
The site also contains a new step-by-step, self-guided process for conducting a full Capital Campaign based on ECF’s time-tested three stage method Discern/Study/Ask, that has been used in hundreds of Episcopal parishes and entities across the country. The new site guides users through considering if they should seek a professional consultant or use the new process and downloadable tools for conducting a full capital campaign themselves.
Starting and sustaining a Planned Giving effort at your parish is more important than ever. The challenges of Covid over the past several years have encouraged many people to review and update their estate plans and, over the next decade, we are also in the midst of one of the greatest transfers of generational wealth in history as Baby Boomers move into their retirement years. The time to take action is now and ECF360 can help.
ECF360’s Annual and Capital Campaign resources are a part of Episcopal Stewardship Navigator, a site created by a new collaboration between ECF and the Presbyterian Foundation. Planned Giving tools were developed from ECF’s popular online resources for Planned Giving on Demand which are all now included in this new comprehensive site.
ECF360 is easy to use and priced at a level where any congregation could afford it! And, all materials created can be stored in its convenient ‘cloud’ storage option for future use and revision. New users are encouraged to create one login per congregation and to pass on that login to future Stewardship leaders for retention of documents and continuity. (ECF Endowment clients will receive complimentary access to the new site.)
Annual subscription cost is $99, or users may sign up for a monthly subscription at $10 per month. ECF is also offering group license discounts to dioceses. Please email [email protected] for more information. ECF continues to offer numerous free resources on the ECF Vital Practices site, including a package of templates and a step by step guide-book for conducting a Special Appeal.
Take a look at ECF360 as your main stewardship season gets underway!