Why has our website turned green?

Announcement #4: We're changing our donation meter!

Two years ago, our Board of Directors and Fundraising Team collaborated on an idea they called the "Grow in Faith" pledge drive. The idea was to set a goal for what we needed to bring in each month in order to be fully staffed, and ask people to make monthly pledges to help us get there. A "Grow in Faith" meter was added to our website to track the progress toward that goal.

Although we never reached our goal, the meter was very successful at helping everyone see what our needs were and track the progress toward meeting them.

The system also had a few drawbacks:

• For one thing, the meter only tracked pledged (automatic monthly) donations. So non-pledged donations like checks and manually-entered gifts didn't affect the meter at all. This year, when our non-pledged donations increased substantially, now enabling us to hire a third staff member, the "Grow in Faith" meter didn't reflect the change.
• Also, our needs have changed significantly over the two years since the meter was established, and there was no easy way to update the goal to reflect that.
• And finally, by lumping our entire budget into a single number, the meter lacked any way to show our supporters how their gifts were making a difference. It didn't differentiate between different projects, goals, and needs, and even though our budgets are public, most people didn't read them and so had no idea why the support was important or how the money was being used.

So today we're retiring the Grow in Faith meter and announcing a new system that will go online in the next few weeks.

You'll still be able to participate in the Grow in Faith drive, but the way we display the results will be different:

• We'll be setting specific goals and deadlines for specific projects.
• We'll display information on both pledged and non-pledged donations, so you can see how every dollar gets us closer to our goal.
• We'll offer new opportunities to publicly recognize our supporters.
• And we'll display simple, easy-to-read information on where the money is going, connected with specific projects and with our 5 missional directions.

The new system will be online soon. In the meantime, thank you for all of you who are helping make this growth possible. Oh, and one more thing... (Continue to next page)