I recently talked to Tony Menke of the Catholic Community Foundation for Eastern South Dakota (CCFESD) in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He’s the CEO and a former FOCUS missionary, so he is passionate about evangelism and serving the Church.
He runs an excellent organization. The foundation is punching way above its weight by any standard. In a relatively small diocese of just 108,000 Catholics, they hold $152,000,000 in assets and have more than $100,000,000 in expectancies (gifts they know will happen at a future date). This didn’t happen by accident.
I wanted to describe some of what he’s doing because the foundation is firing on all cylinders.
What is a Catholic Community Foundation?
First, a word about what a Catholic Community Foundation typically does.
Bishops create Catholic Community Foundations to support the work of the diocese by providing a simple way to make legacy gifts to the Church. The foundation then creates and manages multiple pools of funds called endowments for the good of the diocese and the parishes within the diocese. Each parish can (though doesn’t necessarily have to) set up an endowment with the foundation to support the life of the parish. Endowments are invested for the long term to protect the principle (gifts given to the endowment) and produce investment income that can be used for programs and operations. This structure offers several benefits.
A centralized Community Foundation can provide administrative and investing abilities that might be difficult to find in a parish, especially if the church is smaller or rural. The parishes likewise benefit because parishioners can be encouraged to make legacy gifts to the endowment out of their wills that are many times larger than any gift they’ve ever made. The additional resources an endowment provides help a parish support more ministries and do a better job pastoring current attendees and evangelizing new members.
Catholic Community Foundations also offer their parishes and bishop fundraising expertise. Many pastors have little if any formal training in fundraising. Seminaries don’t tend to teach how to fundraise, despite that being a major responsibility for most pastors. The experts at a Catholic Community Foundation can help a pastor take advantage of fundraising approaches that will be highly beneficial to the life of the Parish.
Serving the Bishop
The Catholic Community Foundation for Eastern South Dakota has a long-standing and very fruitful relationship with their bishop. While they are a standalone organization, they perform many of the functions that an in-house fundraising staff would often do for the office of the bishop.
One of their major responsibilities every year is the Bishop’s Annual Appeal. Like many (if not all) dioceses across the United States (and perhaps the world), the Bishop of Sioux Falls runs a “Bishop’s Annual Appeal” to raise money from the parishes throughout the diocese. Money raised by the appeal supports actions and activities that benefit the entire diocese, like the formation of seminarians, Catholic schools, and regional charitable works.
The Community Foundation for Eastern South Dakota works with the Bishop to create and manage his annual appeal. Their staff creates the mailings, the videos, and any pamphlets or other marketing collateral that will be used for the campaign. The pastors in the diocese show the videos, pass out the pamphlets, and talk about their goals for the annual appeal. These efforts help to inspire donations from local Catholics.
The foundation team also helps their Bishop with a calendar of special fundraising events. They help design, print, and send invitations, manage guest lists, and coordinate the logistics of the event. The amount of work that goes into a special event should not be underestimated. The skill that the foundation staff provides to the bishop to pull off successful events is truly invaluable.
Building the Storehouse
These two activities really lay the groundwork for the success of the foundation in carrying out their core mission, which is building endowments to support Catholic activities throughout the diocese.
In the materials that the foundation provides for the bishop, they include information that informs donors about the foundation’s existence. It might be something simple like a checkbox on a form that says, “Yes, please send me information about setting up a donor-advised fund.” Or “Yes, I’d like help including my parish in my will.”
These simple marketing contacts give Tony and his team a list of individuals they can contact about the services the foundation provides to the donors and the diocese. He has a team of five gift officers who work in different parts of the state and can get on the phone or sit down with donors who want more information.
He shared a conversation that one of his gift officers had with a potential donor. The donor asked, “Who should I give my money to in my will?” He was expecting a list of charitable organizations. The gift officer responded, “Have you thought about leaving a gift that would support your parish?” The donor then asked, “Do they need money? Why would I do that?” The conversation led to the donor committing a significant amount of money in an endowment to support the parish that he’d attended for decades. He just didn’t know that the need was there because the pastor had never asked.
An Apostolate of Generosity
As a fundraiser, one of the scriptures that I love is, “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” (Luke 6:38) This isn’t a quid pro quo, where God will give you $10 for every $1 you give to the church or the poor. God wouldn’t cheat us by giving us something that has no eternal value. Instead, like Jesus told the rich young man who went away sad, our generosity in this life builds up a storehouse of treasure in heaven.
Tony and his team are operating within this economy of the Gift, the divine economy, that bears eternal fruit. The gifts they encourage and enable will bear good fruit today, for generations to come, and into eternity.
Would you like to learn more about raising money for Church and Ministry? Check out Letters From The Almoner, now available on Amazon.com.
