The latest newsletter from The Body Builders talks about the importance of sending gifts to your supporters, not only to encourage better relationships with your financial partners but also to help maintain giving. I have to be honest; in our almost five years in the field, we never sent Christmas gifts. As much as we communicated and made sure to send letters, postcards and make phone calls to our supporters, we just couldn’t afford to buy and ship packages from our field. The cost was too high.
But not every missionary is in Western Europe. So I’m curious: do you give/send Christmas gifts to your supporters?
And here’s the link to the newsletter: ‘Tis the Season…For Giving!
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We do. We send out our organization’s calendar every year. It costs about 4USD per family and our organization in the states sends them out for us (when we provide each supporter’s mailing address.) We can’t personalize our gift, but in this way we can at least save some mailing cost. But when we know that they received our gift, we email them to thank them for their support & partnership.
We send a very nice Christmas card each year with photos of our family. It helps that my wife is a photographer and so our cards are professionally designed and printed. Our supporters all appreciate the annual updated pictures but we have never sent gifts. Our family tradition is to give a Christmas ornament to each family in the church we serve though.
We do not send annual gifts, but when we return to the US we try to bring back a small gift of some sort for those supporters we know we will be seeing. That way we avoid the high postage. I did have one church change pastors, and the new pastor wrote to us asking us to send a small gift, a handicraft characteristic of our field, so he could have it in his office.
I know a missionary family in Colombia and they hand make cards that have a family photo on them. But I never expected a gift from them. In my mind we should be giving gifts to our missionaries!
i recently printed t-shirts that i hope to both sell and give as thank-yous.
@Josh: We always sent Christmas cards to our supporters. I think that’s a reasonable acknowledgment.
@M: I like the idea of presenting the gift in person, and a special request is understandable. I felt like the article was suggesting that if we didn’t send gifts, we missionaries might lose funding from supporters.
@Committed: I, too, wouldn’t expect a missionary to give me something other than cards, letters, communication, etc. If I were able to support a missionary for just $10 a year (and we had some that did), I’d question the logic of the missionary paying $10 (or more) to buy and ship me a gift, which would have been the case in our field.
@Sara: Very creative!
Yes we have sent various Christmas gifts since our first year of being accepted as missionaries. We send a gift to everyone who has supported our ministry, regardless of how much or how often they are able to give. Since we are home missionaries, we don’t have the postage issues overseas missionaries may have. We can say that that small gesture has worked well for us, and our supporters look forward to and appreciate whatever we send. Sending a gift to your supporters says “Thank You” like nothing else! They invest in your ministry regularly, and the gifts, though token, are a tangible way to show your appreciation.
Nope, can’t afford it. But then again, we are missionaries to Western Europe.
So, I’m just curious…per the comments, does this seem to be a funding issue? It appears that if you’re a stateside missionary or in a mission field that’s less expensive, gifts are given to financial supporters. Like David and other missionaries to Western Europe, seems like we just couldn’t afford it but would have if we could.
This year we sent magnetic bookmarks that cost us $,59 each and cost no more that the cost of the Christmas card. Question for overseas missionaries: I know of some overseas missionaries that have someone stateside mail out their prayer letters; couldn’t they put a small gift together for them and send them out so as to avoid the overseas postage? Just asking.
I know many missionaries serving all over the world who do a Christmas gift to supporters every year. It was part of the basic training we got when first raising support. It does take some doing to get everything set up and have a friend in your home country do the mailing. I serve stateside so that makes it a bit easier, but we were encouraged to put that kind of thing into our budget along with the funds for stamps and newsletters. Calendars and resources produced by the mission organization are a common choice; so are knickknacks of some sort from overseas. With only a couple dozen supporters, I splurged and had fresh wreaths sent to them at Christmas time a year ago but I wondered if some of them might find that extravagant. On the other hand, I find their donations of $1200/year and up to be extravagant…
It is nice to be remembered at Christmas time through Christmas cards or Christmas communicatino through email is very nice – and sending pictures is a nice touch..
But presents? I don’t think so. No matter how much a person gives – remember they are giving to the Lord, not you – just as you are giving to the Lord through your service.
God bless you
@Helen: Thank you, I agree. I thought perhaps I was just being a Scrooge!