If you have money set aside in your Giving Fund, you may be thinking about what your next steps are for stewarding those resources well. Here are five ideas to help move your journey of generosity forward with more purpose and joy.
1. Set some goals
How is God calling you to dream big this year? If you want to make an impact in the months ahead, it’s going to take some careful planning. Goal-setting and giving is a big part of that. Listen to NCF co-founder Ron Blue as he talks about how to determine your giving goals. Once you have your numbers, you can use your fund to schedule recurring gifts and grants and run reports to track your progress.
2. Clarify your causes
If you need help identifying where God is calling you to give and what you’re passionate about, NCF has a series of discovery exercises that can help you approach these questions from a scriptural perspective. Download our Causes and Passions resource to explore the issues that bring you joy, challenge your heart, or compel you to invest. Once you’ve clarified your reasons for giving, you can log in to your fund to research and find organizations you want to start supporting.
3. Make it a family affair
Your fund gives you a tangible way to invite your spouse, your adult children, and even your grandchildren into the giving conversation. Your fund makes it easy to go online together to set aside money for giving, check your balance, review your grant history, research charities, and make giving decisions together. To get inspired, take a look at this very detailed example of how one family went about planning a fun and successful family giving event on Zoom.
4. Multiply your impact with a match
If you want to use the balance you’ve set aside to encourage others to be more generous, you may want to consider offering a matching grant to the charity of your choice. NCF givers Tom and Mary Vande Guchte make almost all their large gifts as matching grants to encourage giving among a charity’s new or lapsed donors or to increase gifts from existing donors. “We want to give a ministry a tool to help them broaden their donor base and also deepen their relationship with current donors,” Tom says.
5. Lock in your legacy
If you have money set aside in your fund, it’s important to make sure you have a succession plan in place to instruct NCF about what to do with any remaining balance in your fund after you’re gone. It’s simple to log in to your fund to build one today. The peace of mind a succession plan offers can be significant. “At our passing, we want our giving focused on ministry,” NCF giver Greg Latimer says. “So, we’ve set that parameter up, and NCF will be our sentry and make sure that those wishes are carried out after I’m gone. That is huge for me.”
Log in to your Giving Fund. Or if you don’t have a Giving Fund yet, you can open one in minutes.
