Rok Pisk shares how a small Bible Society in a strongly secular country of around two million people – Slovenia – has made great progress in various aspects of its digital transformation, enabling it to both serve and engage with its audiences more effectively and significantly grow its online income. (If you prefer to, you can watch Rok’s 9-minute video presentation beneath the article.)
Slovenia is mainly Catholic, but there is strong secularisation also because we were under the communist regime for 50 years. The Bible Society was founded in 1993 in preparation for the new Bible translation – Slovenian Standard Version. And for many years, the Bible Society was basically a publishing house, or a bookstore. We don’t have a fundraising department. We only have one fundraiser, and she works part time.
I am sharing this to say that even if you are a small Bible Society, you can do it!
I joined the Bible Society five years ago and we had this problem then, and we have it now: our donors are dying. We had a great donor community which was created after we published the Slovenian Standard Version in 1996. And many of them have supported us for more than 20 years. But if someone joined when he was 60 years old, now he will be in his 80s or has passed away already. So the number of donors is dropping and sales are also dropping due to secularisation. GDPR took away three-quarters of our email subscribers, so we wondered how we survive? How do we find new donors to support our mission and make it more sustainable?
With the help of UBS we started the process of digital transformation. We saw great potential there but didn’t know how to do it efficiently. Some steps were already made: we had a webstore; we were sending emails using a free Mailchimp account; we had some Facebook pages. But we really started in 2018, when we built our new website and started using Project Engage.
Results? See for yourself!
We started collecting online donations in 2018. By 2021, online donations had grown to one-third of our total donation income. But it’s not all about income. In January 2023 we had a very successful fundraising campaign for Slovenian missionary in Senegal. The whole campaign was online. We got about 3x more than we expected, so we were able to provide not just printed Bibles, but also audio players that are crucial for a population with a low literacy rate. But what is even more important is that almost 70% of donors were new!
This really gives us hope that we can become financially sustainable using digital tools.
