One of our values at FEBC Australia is Faithful Stewardship. God is the owner, we administer on His behalf.
“… one day each one of us will be called to give an account for how we have managed what the Master has given us.”
A great example: Alexey’s recent visit from Russia was one we were keen to share with our supporters. Planning public events in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, we couldn’t use Skywaves as a means of communicating dates and venues because it wouldn’t have landed in the mail in time. It takes over a month to research, write, design, print and post Skywaves!
This is where email is a wonderful tool – it’s easy for us to share fast news such as overseas speakers and speaking events. It doesn’t have to replace the printed Skywaves or Prayer and Praise – many of our supporters tell us they prefer reading the wonderful FEBC stories in print and making notes on their prayer points, and that is absolutely what we want to encourage.
Our focus on good stewardship means we have stringently sourced ways of ensuring our print costs for our publications are kept low. Yet email is perfect for quick, alerts or receipts.
But back to Alexey’s visit. Knowing we had public events in Sydney and Brisbane, we wanted to tell our supporters living in nearby postcodes. However, out of the 800+ supporters we identified in those postcode areas, only 140 had emails. Then, widening the search, although some records had emails, not all included postcodes – meaning when we were searching by postcode it made it hard to identify everyone we wanted to reach.
We know that stories and encouragement from the field are vital to FEBC’s supporters and we desperately wanted as many people as possible to attend Alexey’s events should they be able. We would love to have been able to email most of those 700 letters, rather than use print and post. We also would have loved to be assured that we had all the postcodes we needed in our database so we reached everyone who wanted to be encouraged.
While we advertised Alexey’s events in Eternity newspaper and on social media, knowing we have valuable, up-to-date contact details from our supporters goes a long way towards keeping you informed.
